The digital battle between Europe and the United States
The booing of JD Vance at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan has become the audible representation of a growing sentiment within the European Union. The arrogance of Trumpism has awakened a imperceptible, wounded European pride that is beginning to surface. The "rupture" that the Canadian Prime Minister Mark CarneyThe debate that began in Davos has also started on this side of the Atlantic. It is still embryonic, more declarative than real. But the EU has already defined the playing field for the confrontation with the United States that it is prepared to fight: the digital space.
Exactly one year ago, Vice President Vance warned European leaders at the artificial intelligence summit in Paris that the US would not accept legislation aimed at "putting pressure on American companies," and directly pointed to the European AI law and the laws regulating digital services and markets as responsible for Silicon Valley. enfants terribles Those involved in digital innovation have spent years lobbying and employing multimillion-dollar strategies to try to halt or weaken the European regulatory response to a global technological competition that permeates every level of the digitization process, from public administrations to the economy, from private spaces to the minds of social media users. This battle, with Donald Trump's return to the White House, has added the virulence of the Trump administration to its cause. The president of post-truth and alternative realities has declared that there can be no restraint on the power of technological oligarchs who are redefining the world, from social interactions to armed conflicts.
Little by little, the idea of "reducing the risk" posed by this economic, technological, and military dependence of the European Union on a partner that is no longer reliable is beginning to take shape. It is not only the unease that many EU governments have been expressing: the distance is also growing among European public opinion. A YouGov poll published last week confirmed not only the negative perception Trump currently has of the US, but also that, of all the arguments Washington uses against the EU, the least shared among Europeans is that freedom of expression is threatened on this side of the Atlantic, at least in the terms the administration claims.
With the publication of the US National Security Strategy, which announced the intention to strengthen political parties that challenge the EU internally, the Union feels that the red line of interference has been crossed. From Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the Brexit referendum to Elon Musk's political participation in meetings of the British and German far right, the ideological agendas of Washington and Silicon Valley have been aligning against the European Union.
The British newspaper Financial Times It is claimed that the US State Department plans to fund, this year, organizations and think tanks across Europe aligned with the MAGA doctrine. According to a report by the US Congressional Judiciary Committee cited in the same article, the objective is to dismantle the Digital Services Act (DSA), which the EU passed in 2023 and which requires technology platforms to remove illegal content and provides transparency. Washington literally calls the European legislative framework "censorship" of free speech.
But US aggression has had the opposite effect to what was expected. Europe, which had decided to slow down its own digital legislation so as not to further anger its transatlantic big brother, is now clinging to the DSA to assert its own identity.
Last December, the European Commission imposed its first fine under the Digital Services Act (DSA) against Elon Musk for repeated violations of the regulation by the X network, demanding €120 million. Last month, Brussels also opened an investigation into Grok, the chatbot. Musk's AI, for generating and publishing nude images without consent. And he has issued an ultimatum to TikTok to change its "addictive design."
The limits of European freedom of expression lie in the hate speech that social media has dedicated itself to fueling and amplifying.
