Since the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, Musk, Vance, and their orbit of Russian oligarchs have been crying “censorship.” The reality is the opposite. The EU didn’t target opinions or content. It went after three practices that erode transparency on digital platforms—practices that now stand at the center of the MAGA–Russia project to weaken Europe from within.
Europe isn’t censoring anyone. It is trying to stop digital manipulation from poisoning democratic debate.
The first issue is the blue check. Under Musk, what used to be a marker of verified identity has become a commodity anyone can buy—no verification, no safeguards, just algorithmic rewards for those who pay.
The consequence is straightforward: the blue check is now the engine of bot farms.
One basement-level bot factory — like the one uncovered in Latvia — can churn out tens of millions of anonymous accounts, buy each of them a blue check, and unleash “verified” swarms that dominate every trend.
These automated armies systematically amplify pro-MAGA and pro-Russia narratives, push anti-democratic messaging, undermine trust in European governments that refuse to align with Putin and Trump, and promote far-right and extremist parties across the continent.
Under Musk, the blue check is no longer a commercial feature. It is an instrument of information warfare. The EU fine doesn’t censor anything. It targets a structural mechanism designed to manipulate the public sphere.
The second issue is political advertising transparency. The Digital Services Act requires platforms to disclose who pays for an ad, what it promotes, and who it targets. X ignored all of it.
Without a public ad archive, it becomes impossible to know who funds covert campaigns, to distinguish real reporting from manufactured narratives, or to identify coordinated foreign influence operations.
And opacity has consequences. In recent years we’ve seen micro-targeted ads engineered to polarize debates; fake newspapers with names almost identical to real outlets spreading fabricated stories about immigration and political corruption; and Kremlin-linked information operations disguised as harmless commercial ads.
Opaque advertising isn’t a technical quirk. It is an instrument for destabilizing democratic debate.
Platforms have commercial incentives to protect their data. But when they become political actors, transparency stops being optional. Researchers request anonymized datasets—nothing that compromises privacy—to measure the causes and consequences of social-media use.
X responded by banning all forms of scraping, even for public content, discouraging collaboration with the academic world, and erecting technical barriers to obstruct independent research. This has nothing to do with protecting privacy. It is about preserving opacity.
Because with real data access, researchers could document algorithmic manipulation, coordinated propaganda networks, and the toxic externalities of platform design—on mental health, social cohesion, political trust, and elections.
And it’s no coincidence: authoritarian projects always begin the same way — by capturing information and silencing independent inquiry.
The DSA doesn’t censor anyone. It demands transparency. The MAGA project, by contrast, seeks to eliminate transparency—because without it, it becomes far easier to erode institutional trust, empower extremist movements, manipulate elections, and weaken Europe from within.
As the new U.S. National Security Strategy openly states, the objective is a fragmented Europe, governed by nationalist and illiberal parties, easily influenced by both Washington and Moscow. Social networks are one of the key tools enabling this strategy.
The EU is not suppressing opinions. It is protecting consumer rights and defending our freedom in the most civil and proportionate way possible. Russian and American oligarchs are furious because Europe is finally trying to limit their anti-democratic interference.