@mathver
EU law and tech policy, mostly musings on content moderation, platform governance, privacy, AI. Now: Co-Founder & Director @awo.agency. Fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Then: EU Parliament. UN. Mozilla. PhD in EU law.
“The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda”
- www.reuters.com/world/us-pla...
X isn’t being penalised for hosting lawful speech. It is being penalised for business practices that make fraud easier and transparency harder. In any other sector, a product that enables impersonation or conceals the identity of advertisers would be recalled.
(3)Preventing researchers to scrutinize what is going on on its platform. X imposed unnecessary barriers and rejected valid applications from eligible researchers. A platform that calls itself a champion of transparency shouldn’t be afraid of independent scrutiny. What is there to hide?
X not only did not want to address these issues, but actively wants to prevent scrutiny in the fraud that its platform enables.
(2) A broken advertising transparency system
The DSA requires platforms to let users see who is paying to influence them. X’s ad library is incomplete, inconsistent, and missing essential disclosures. Without this transparency, scam ads are harder to be taken down.
(1) Misleading “verification” that enables impersonation scams: X turned the blue check into a paid badge without ensuring any meaningful verification. That design choice makes it dramatically easier for fraudsters to pose as real individuals, brands, or authorities.
The Commission’s findings focus on three failures of a broken product that have nothing to do with the opinions people express on the platform:
Today’s 120 million euro fine against X under the Digital Services Act (DSA) will be spun as a decision against “free speech.” It’s not. (1/7) #digitalservicesact #dsa #dsa ec.europa.eu/commission/p...
Translating the CJEU judgment in Amazon vs EC on art.40 DSA: (1) giving vetted researchers data isn’t a disproportionate privacy intrusion; (2) compliance may be costly but you can bear it; (3) if you have a better way to study systemic risks, we haven’t heard it. curia.europa.eu/juris/docume...
This is real news. Reporters, please report on it.
ELEVEN former top FCC officials, Republican and Democratic, came together to condemn FCC Chairman Carr's abuses of power and efforts to suppress legal speech.
It's not just Jimmy Kimmel. The FCC's jawboning and chill on legal speech is ongoing.
Attention, freelance tech reporters: Omydiar Network has an open call for their Winter 2026 Reporters in Residence program. Deadline: November 15. $8,000 a month stipend and $2,000 travel budget (totaling $50,000). Good luck! job-boards.greenhouse.io/omidyarnetwo...
The biggest source for any DSA investigation into addictive design features might not be platforms' risk assessments, but the more than 6 million documents that are part of the pretrial discovery process in the US www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
NIEUWS: AIVD en MIVD delen minder informatie met hun Amerikaanse partners. Dat zeggen de hoofden van de Nederlandse diensten in de Volkskrant. Peter Reesink (MIVD): ‘Dat we soms ook dingen niet meer vertellen, dat is waar.’ 1/5
www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/n...
The UK government must tackle resistance from those who want to return to a “mythical past” as it develops its plans for AI-led economic growth, the new UK junior minister for artificial intelligence said www.mlex.com/mlex/artific...
They always start with free speech. It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Free speech? And they can use it to shut down anyone who criticises them, because it’s all “free speech”
After “free speech” it’s “protecting women and girls”
And then it’s whatever they actually wanted.
Data compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy suggests at least 22,000 jobs were lost in the sector in the first six months of the year on.ft.com/4nBgdu4
