Yeah sure """journalists""", the list of individuals under sanction in the EU is small and usually there's a good reason they are in that list.
You should ask yourself the opposite, why people supporting Russian views in the EU often are from a criminal background?
For now excuse me but I won't cry for the poor money laundrers of the Russian mafia and their yachts.
This list is public as well, feel free to consult it.
Try to find matches for the XX placeholders!
What’s concerning here isn’t “wrong opinions being criticized,” it’s administrative punishment without criminal process: loss of banking access, travel bans, and professional exclusion imposed by executive designation, justified after the fact as “they must be criminals anyway.” That logic works for any XX, and that’s exactly the problem.
This doesn’t make the EU “totalitarian,” but it does point to an illiberal drift where due process is treated as optional if the target is politically unsympathetic. The precedent matters more than the headcount. Once viewpoint + security assessment is enough to trigger real penalties, the boundary between law enforcement and political enforcement starts to blur, regardless of which XX you plug in.
My original intent was to show up a paradoxon: A group of 5 European NGO activists has been put under a travel ban by the US yesterday. Two of them are german members of an organisation called "HateAid", which provides psychological and legal support for victims of hate speech. They are blamed for supporting Internet censorship (= terrorism in US perception) and are therefore denied entry to the US.
Or, in other words: "We (US) censor them (EU) for supporting censorship."
BTW: I did some research about EU journalists or citizens losing bank access or being put under travel restrictions by administration. I couldn't find an example. Would be great if you could provide some background!
For example, in many countries it's illegal to say that WWII concentration camps didn't exist.
In Belgium, a media can't make a publication that mocks the King.
This social media shit obviously needs to be based in the country it operates, that's the only way these international moderation policy issues can ever be resolved.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2023/01/07/belgians-to-skip-jai...
Belgians are allowed to criticize the monarchy and the only protections the king has are the same defamation protections that every citizen has.
As far as being disallowed from denying the holocaust, there are very obvious good reasons for that law in Germany. I’d love for you to attempt to explain how it’s a bad thing without looking pro-fascist.
Remember the tolerance paradox. Tolerating intolerance is not something that promotes personal liberty and freedom.
> I’d love for you to attempt to explain how it’s a bad thing
I'm not here for that, I was just stating facts. Each country/culture/civilization has their own characterization of good and bad.
Some goes as far as saying that tolerance for everything is "good" and that if you don't tolerate everything you're "bad".
You were clearly trying to make an argument to say that the EU is being unfairly restrictive of speech. So back up your argument!
In my opinion, you are refusing to back it up because your statements were weak to begin with.
You're making a shortcut, maybe based on the fact that usually some people use this arguments to complain about EU.
> In my opinion, you are refusing to back it up because your statements were weak to begin with.
No, you're wrong from the beginning. I think it's an excellent thing that there are restrictions on public freedom of speech and what I wrote is merely a stating of facts.
You find my arguments weak because they only exist in your imagination.
"1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. [...]
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
To me it reads as "you have the right to free speech without interference by public authorities, except in all cases where public authorities want to interfere in whatever form and for whatever reason".
Russia has staged assassinations on European soil using radioactive and chemical weapons. They've sabotaged civilian and military infrastructure (both digitally and physically), plotted to bomb civilian cargo flights, etc. How much farther should Russia and it's agents be allowed to go before they're considered security risks?
The EU is hypocritical, and the restrictions on freedom you see in Russia are actually way less extreme versions of the exact same laws in the books in Europe. Europe did it first and Russia is way more reasonable about it.
I swear you’re not even very far from repeating a Steve Rosenberg Vladimir Putin exchange verbatim.
It would be kind of hilarious how gullible the tech libertarian bro demographic is to Russian propaganda if it wasn’t so sad and dangerous.
It sounds like you're talking about Red Media, which I had to look up on my own because of how vague your argument was to begin with.
The organization claims it has been targeted for the content of its reporting, although the German government says that it Red Media operates under the Turkish AFA Medya umbrella that has close ties to RT and Russian funding.
I think the obvious way to see which side deserves more grains of salt is to see if any other journalistic outlets have been sanctioned that report in similar ways. It seems like Germany has only sanctioned this specific media company that has obvious ties to Russia, not every outlet that has done Palestine-sympathetic or Israel-skeptical reporting.
https://perspektive-online.net/2025/05/nach-politischem-und-...
He did the same with African Stream under the same allegations.
https://westafricaweekly.com/meta-suspends-african-stream-ac...
It seems like the fact remains that Red Media is the only media outlet that has been hit by these direct government sanctions. If these sanctions were based on content and speech, there would be dozens of publications under these sanctions. There are even mainstream US publications that have published journalism critical of Israel’s role in the war.
The three reasons for the fine are:
* Lack of transparency / misleading verified checkmarks
* Lack of open data access
* Lack of any ad transparency showing who paid to show which ads
None of those are censorship. All of those are basic good governance and transparency.
The censorship angle is nothing but FUD by an admin terrified of good governance and transparency.
Personally, I'd like to know who is trying to steer the conversation, in light of psyop campaigns and hybrid warfare against our democracy.
I'd also like researchers to be able to examine how a large public forum is run.
Again, transparency is the name of the game.
What use is that information to governments, if not to guide their censorship efforts? It's a setup for labelling your opposition as "hybrid warfare" combatants, not because they picked up a gun but rather because they're saying things you think shouldn't be said.
What X is scared of is showing that @AlabamaMAGALady and @DeutscherPatriot are based in St. Petersburg.
Again, there is no censorship. Just a transparency requirement.
Prior checkmarks were for anyone who could pay 15K USD. X simply made it cheaper.
There is also a bizarre fine against Elon personally.
The EU makes more money from fining American tech companies than it makes from EU tech.
Don’t let unelected bureaucrats convince you that this is anything more than a revenue raising exercise for themselves.
You make unsupported claims of censorship, but how exactly is a fine against misleading blue dot censorship since it contains no speech? The company could change how they describe the blue dot or attach disclaimers but they don't.
Why? Because the EU's actions serve Musk's and the Administrations political goals of vilifying anyone who has a different view, especially the EU, and using the levers of the state to retaliate and threaten.
> The EU makes more money from fining American tech companies than it makes from EU tech.
If it wasn't for ASML there would be no tech industry. The world depends on a single EU company for advanced chips and for its continued prosperity.
> Don’t let unelected bureaucrats convince you that this is anything more than a revenue raising exercise for themselves.
You're just another EU hater pushing mindless tropes. Why are you so full of hate?
No, they are voted on by elected representatives.
They must be proposed by the commission, which is not elected but appointed.
The commission is appointed by directly elected governments. It's the same as any ministerial post in any government.
It's also the same level of indirection as the US presidency, which is appointed by the Electoral College.
Oh no! Someone pointed out an inconvenient fact again!
> It's also the same level of indirection as the US presidency, which is appointed by the Electoral College.
But the US President doesn't have a monopoly on setting the agenda of Congress, the Commission does with respect to the EU Parliament. Anyone with any political awareness knows that if you set the agenda you control the outcome.
It's not a fact. It's just pedantry that is conveniently not applied anywhere else. Nobody would say the US president isn't elected or ministers aren't elected, but when it comes to the EU a double standard is applied by dishonest ideologues.
The rest of your post is classic moving of goal posts, but fwiw Congress has been absolutely irrelevant since the sitting president decided to rule by decree.
Absolute gold, thanks for that.
> The rest of your post is classic moving of goal posts.
At least you lot have a wicked sense of irony.
The US president can't propose laws, only Congress can, yet he can "set the agenda".
Only the EU Commission can propose laws, but the EU Council (composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states) sets the agenda.
"The European Council is a collegiate body and a symbolic collective head of state, that defines the overall political direction and general priorities of the European Union."
They are functionally equivalent.
Fantastic example of unintentional scare quotes.
> Only the EU Commission can propose laws, but the EU Council (composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states) sets the agenda.
Who has to nominate all the possible members of the EU Commission? Is it the EU Council?
Face it, the entire EU structure is designed to prevent little people from ever being able to get a law passed which would possibly benefit them except as populist measures inside the EU which stick it to the evil Americans again to promote internal support for the EU.
> Face it...
Beaten by the facts, you just move on to more vague and hateful nonsense. The EU is not the US. The EU is not a vassal state of the US, it will make its own determinations and punish whoever breaks laws within the EU.
US companies don't have to like it, they can leave. The US wouldn't EU companies breaking US laws so this is all just rank hypocrisy and bigotry.
Long windedly confirming exactly what I said while attempting to obfuscate the reality. You aren't appointing anyone to the European Commission that didn't get nominated via the European Council, which is the heads of states, and the resulting people then write the laws voted on by the European Parliament.
Unsurprisingly this leads to enormous bureaucratic inertia for the benefit of those that have already captured the system. It is as democratic as the internal functions of the CCP.
> US companies don't have to like it, they can leave.
Why doesn't the EU make them leave? Because you want to act all superior to, say, the CCP or Russia.
> Beaten by the facts
Not even close
> more vague and hateful nonsense.
Come off it - that's your whole m.o.
Yes technically the us 'electors' could vote for a different presidential ticket, but that's never happened in practice and even then their options are generally limited by who ran, electors can't pick just anyone.
Nobody ever complains about ambassadors not being democratic though. Same thing goes for, idk, a Secretary of State or whatever, they all go through the same process.
Only when it comes to EU institutions people can't hide their hatred and can't help themselves but make the same old dishonest claim.
Virginia’s 23 Democratic electors (Southern) refused to vote for Democratic VP candidate Richard Mentor Johnson due to his open common-law relationship with Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman of mixed race (octoroon). Interracial marriage was illegal under anti-miscegenation laws. They voted for Van Buren (president) but switched VP votes to William Smith (another Democrat), denying Johnson a majority. The Senate elected Johnson anyway.
The EU systems balances national sovereignty with direct democracy but leans toward the former. It's a good system.
Anyway, EU states went to great lengths to join the EU and can leave at any time. Besides the self-destructive UK, none have.
> They must be proposed by the commission, which is not elected but appointed.
The commission is elected by elected representatives. Just like in many countries the leader isn't directly elected by voters but by their elected representatives.
Your comment is just ideological nonsense. You could argue in good faith about the pros and cons of various systems but you don't, it's just hate because you heard Trump or Musk or some right wing figure say it say it and you're garrotting it.
Prove me wrong by detailing whats wrong with it, and "muh democracy" doesn't count.
We're at the "make arbitrary demands" stage of blatant denialism then.
You can sleep soundly again.
Citation needed. Everything I've been able to find says that they were free.
This was especially plain to see in the crypto side of twitter.
Platforms cannot make statements on the legitimacy of a user without incurring some level of responsibility, regardless if it's "obvious" that a verified badge simply means that you've spent a couple dollars.
The average internet user is closer to your grandmother than you or me, and that is who these laws are meant to protect.
So what's the right level of "responsibility"? Is letsencrypt issuing certificates to websites (which shows a lock icon in browsers) also fooling grandma into sending over her credit card details? What about EV certificates from a few years ago, where you paid ~$300/yr for a green lock? Should the EU get in the business of regulating what levels of verification are required to show lock/checkmark icons?
This is what they've been pushing for with app stores.
You might want to read Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (RStV), (§ 55 Abs. 1): "Anbieter von Telemedien, die nicht ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen, haben folgende Informationen leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar zu halten: Namen und Anschrift, bei juristischen Personen auch Namen und Anschrift des Vertretungsberechtigten."
Google translate: " Providers of telemedia services that are not exclusively for personal or family purposes must keep the following information easily recognizable, directly accessible and permanently available: name and address, and in the case of legal entities, also the name and address of the authorized representative. "
Does advocating for one political position or another count as a personal or family matter?
Verification was “this account is who it says it is”. Not “this account has $10 to spare”.
People routinely had their checkmark removed when they said something controversial.
It was not indeed happening "routinely".
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/15/16658600/twitter-verific...
A verification badge should be something that says "this person indeed is who they claim to be" not "they can spend a couple of bucks a month" nor "we like him enough to give them a checkmark". Both are extremely unhelpful. The latter probably even more unhelpful since it is very subjective.
Probably should've been two different flags, but it wasn't.
The fine was to protected the users from that scam.
I like paying taxes to protected the users that don't have the ability to detect scams as we all here have (most of the time).
EU miss the point equally to the Congress in uuss when non tech people believe they can rule (or just lobbied).
But on this case, there will be no problem if Twitter had decided to use another checkmark for pro accounts.
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