The U.S. State Department announced sanctions against a former European Union commissioner, who sought to keep terror propaganda off social media after Oct. 7.
Thierry Briton, the EU’s former top technology regulator, is among five people for whom the State Department said it would deny visas for trying to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring opposing viewpoints.
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states, in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” stated Marco Rubio, U.S. secretary of state.
Breton was charged with implementing the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires social media companies to moderate content. The mandate drew ire from some on the American right who see it as an effort to filter out their points of view.
Breton went toe-to-toe with X owner Elon Musk, and the commission fined the platform nearly $142 million for “deceptive” practices related to its blue-check system, which the commission said gave users the mistaken impression that some on the site were verified.
“To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” Breton wrote on the site, responding to the State Department announcement.
After Oct. 7, Breton wrote to Musk, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives warning them that disinformation and illegal content were spreading on their platforms. He added that the tech giants risked incurring significant fines if they didn’t address those issues right away.
Breton told Musk that he was concerned about “violent and terrorist content that appears to circulate” on X—the company formerly known as Twitter—which might violate the company’s policies.
Speaking of the Digital Services Act, Breton warned about “fake and manipulated images and facts” about the Israel-Hamas war, “such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games.”
There appeared to be “manifestly false or misleading information,” he added.
Musk reportedly cut back in a significant way on content moderators when he bought the company. (JNS has sought comments often from X in the past.)
The X owner admitted that the site struggled to react to the flood of disinformation in the early days and weeks after Oct. 7. He at one point directed users to an account that he said was “good” for “following the war in real time,” but that handle was soon found to have posted anti-Jewish comments repeatedly.
Many analysts say that X’s blue-check system, which had been a verification tool prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company, is responsible for a lot of disinformation on the platform, after Musk converted it to a premium service without the verification component.
