The European Union has a long history of fining US tech companies (check out my full piece on this, Sucks to EU), but under its new Digital Services Act (DSA) it is now explicitly fining X for speech violations. Specifically, the EU is demanding a system of “expert” moderators and, according to Elon Musk, political censorship. This has prompted a furious response not only from the American tech industry, but the American government, which seems to view the fines not only as an act of trade war, but a dangerous sign of liberal decay in Europe.

Many Europeans have argued back with a clownish series of little lists and charts alleging they are the true free speech bastion, which is an unambiguous distortion of reality. The fact that there are no real protections for large and important swaths of speech in Europe is beyond doubt. I was going to write at length about this myself, and then this morning I read David Heinemeier Hansson’s fantastic piece, which smartly connects the anti-liberal trend to his continent’s broader industry decay, and I thought I’d share it with you all today.

Europe is the birthplace of almost every important idea that underpins the foundation of our Western world. Most Americans descend from Europe. Europe has been a vital ally in freedom and prosperity for almost a century. It is in all of our best interest that this continent remembers how to flourish.

Now, a word from one of their greats.

-Solana

The gap between Europe’s self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that’s threatening to swallow the continent’s future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe’s sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn’t worked for the past forty years.

Let’s start with free speech, and the €120 million fine just levied against X. The fig leaf for this was painted as “deceptive design” and “transparency for researchers”, but the EU already bared its real intentions when they announced this authoritarian quest back in 2023 with charges of “dissemination of illegal content” and “information manipulation” (aka censorship).

Besides, even the fig leaf itself is rotten. Meta offers the very same paid verification scheme as X but, according to Musk, has chosen to play ball with the EU censorship apparatus, so no investigation for them. And the citizens of Europe clearly don’t seem bothered much by any “deceptive design,” as X continues to be a top-ranked download across every country on the continent.

But you can see why many politicians in Europe are eager to punish X for giving Europeans a social media that doesn’t cooperate with its crackdown on wrongthink. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is personally responsible for 5,000(!!) cases pursuing his subjects for insults online, which has led to house raids for utterances as banal as calling him a “filthy drunk”.

Germany is not an outlier either. The UK has been arresting over 10,000 people per year since 2020 for illicit tweets, Facebook posts, and silent prayers. France has thousands of yearly cases for speech-related offenses too. No wonder people on X aren’t eager to volunteer their name and address when their elected officials crash out over their tweets.

It’s against this backdrop — thousands of yearly arrests for banal insults or crass opposition to government policies — that some Europeans still try to convince themselves they’re the true champions of free speech and freedom of the press. Delulu indeed.

But this isn’t just about the lack of free speech in Europe. The X fine also highlights just how weak and puny the European tech sector has become. Get this: The EU’s tech-fine operation produced more income for European coffers than all the income taxes paid by its public internet tech companies in 2024!!

That’s primarily because Europe basically stopped creating new, large companies more than half a century ago. So as the likes of Nokia died off, there was nobody new to replace them. In the last fifty years, the number and size of new European companies worth $10 billion or more is alarmingly small:

But even the old industrial titans of Europe are now struggling. Germany hasn’t grown its real GDP in five years. The net-zero nonsense has seriously hurt its competitiveness, and its energy costs are now 2-3x that of America and China. This is after Germany spent a staggering ~€700 billion on green energy projects — despite Europe as a whole being just 6% of world emissions. All the while, the EU as a whole sent over twenty billion euros to Russia to pay for energy in 2024.