Member of European Parliament Sandro Gozi: EU will shut down X

Erik Strand, 25.08.2024

Sandro Gozi, who is elected as an MEP for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, has stated that if Elon Musk does not comply with EU rules on digital services, X can be shut down. In the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (one can read that Sandro Gozi is Italian, but is elected MEP in France), Gozi is quoted saying the following:

“If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely dismantle the platform in the territory of the Union.”

Gozi’s dystopian and draconian measures deserve a comment. Censoring social media is difficult. Each day social media users produce enormous amounts of posts. Some of these posts contain hate speech or false news – or copyright infringements. One thing is determining what constitutes hate speech. Another thing is determining what is false news. That task can prove difficult. In order to avoid legal consequences, it can be tempting for social media companies to apply algoritms that censor more than necessary. This possibility was one of the arguments used against EUs copyright bill, as mentioned in this article from 2019.

If we look at recent history, social media platforms have indeed done a lot of censoring. One can for example read this article from The Free Thought project in 2018, commenting on alternative media beeing outright blocked in social media, detrimental to society’s need for information and debate.

Sandro Gozi and other’s call for drastic measures is a call for measures that will to an even larger extent harm free speech.