Senior US Diplomats Criticize EU Policies That Hit X With $140 Million Fine

Even before the EU’s fine was announced, U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested it amounted to punishing X for ‘not engaging in censorship.’

The logo of social network X displayed on a smartphone in Brussels on Sept. 27, 2024. Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several other senior U.S. officials have criticized the internet policies of the European Union (EU), likening them to censorship, after the governing bloc last week levied Elon Musk’s social media platform X with a $140 million fine for breaching its online content rules.

On Dec. 5, EU tech regulators fined X 120 million euros (about $140 million) following a two-year investigation under the Digital Services Act, concluding that the social platform had breached multiple transparency obligations, including the “deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark,' the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”

The EU accused X of converting its verified badges into a paid feature without sufficient identity checks, arguing that this deceived users into believing the accounts were authentic and exposed them to fraud, manipulation, and impersonation.

This meant the platform had failed to meet the Digital Services Act’s accessibility and detail standards, leaving out key information that prevented efforts to track coordinated disinformation, illicit activities, and election interference, according to the EU.

Even before the EU’s fine was announced, U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested it amounted to punishing X for “not engaging in censorship.”

On Dec. 5, Rubio wrote in a post on X that the fine was not “just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”

“The days of censoring Americans online are over,” Rubio wrote.

On Dec. 6, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the EU’s policies are threatening the trans-Atlantic partnership.

“The nations of Europe cannot look to the US for their own security at the same time they affirmatively undermine the security of the US itself through the (unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative) EU. This fine is just the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote on X.

In a follow-up post, Landau said his recent trip to Brussels for NATO’s ministerial meeting left him feeling that there is a “glaring inconsistency between [the United States’] relations with NATO and the EU.”

“When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that Transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security,” he said. “But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security—including censorship. ... This inconsistency cannot continue.”

U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder called the EU’s fine on X “regulatory overreach targeting American innovation.”

The EU also charged Meta and TikTok with breaching its Digital Services Act transparency guidelines in October and then accused Temu, a Chinese online marketplace, of violating guidelines intended to prevent sales of illegal products.

TikTok, however, was able to avoid the fines levied on X by making concessions to the EU.

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram were accused of failing to offer a user-friendly and easily accessible procedure for reporting illegal content, including child sexual abuse material and terrorist content, which the parent company denied.

Then on Dec. 4, the European Commission said it had opened an antitrust investigation into Meta to determine whether the company’s policy blocking third-party artificial intelligence tools on WhatsApp violates the EU’s competition regulations.

Helmut Brandstätter, a member of the European Parliament, shot back at Vance’s post condemning the EU’s decision to fine X.

“There is No censorship in Europe, and everybody has to follow our rules,” he wrote on X on Dec. 5.

“[U.S. President Donald Trump] fights the free press, suing newspapers and TV stations. So leave us alone.”

In response, Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers posted a video to X in which she referenced the German woman who was recently given a harsher jail sentence than a convicted rapist after calling the latter a “disgraceful rapist pig.” The woman was convicted of insults and criminal threats under German law and sentenced to a weekend in jail, while the rapist received a suspended sentence without prison time because of his age.

“So which is it, Mr. Bronstetter, is there no censorship in Europe? Or do we all have to follow your rules?” Rogers said.

Andrew Moran, Naveen Athrappully, and Reuters contributed to this report.