Regulating X Isn’t Censorship. It’s Self-Defense
The election was cancelled on ‘flimsy suspicions’, Vance said, mocking the idea that a democracy could be compromised by what he called ‘a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country’. If that were enough to destroy an election, he argued, then perhaps it wasn’t very strong to begin with.
Ironically, Vance goes further in defending TikTok than even Xi Jinping, who, when pressed by the wife of Brazil’s president in May over the app’s harms to women and children, told the Brazilian president that Brazil had every right to regulate it.
Last week, the commission made a preliminary finding under the DSA over TikTok’s failure to maintain a transparent advertisement library. These libraries—designed to show who paid for what, who was targeted and what was shown—are essential for spotting scams, covert influence operations and electoral disinformation.
It is precisely the kind of mechanism that could have prevented Romania from having to annul its election, after networks of fake and dormant accounts were used to artificially amplify a far-right, pro-Trump and pro-Kremlin candidate.
The DSA reflects hard-earned European wisdom. It comes from historical memory of democracies undone by propaganda, foreign interference and the normalization of lies. Vance and Musk frame their agenda as ‘free speech’, but in Europe, it increasingly looks like a coordinated push to weaken democratic institutions and empower their far-right allies.
The EU’s commissioner for technological sovereignty, security and democracy, Henna Virkkunen, has taken a different tack, rejecting Breton’s theatrics in favor of quiet precision. ‘Of course, many things we can always negotiate and discuss’, she said in February. ‘But we can’t negotiate about our values’.
Those values are embedded in the DSA’s most basic expectations. Platforms such as X must be transparent about who is paying for ads, their verification systems must not mislead users, and researchers must be granted access to essential data. These are not radical demands. They are basic measures to safeguard democratic discourse.
According to Virkkunen, the commission has expanded its probe into X, which helps explain the delay. But the DSA’s credibility may be damaged if enforcement continues to stall.
The lesson for Australia is clear. We cannot afford to adopt Vance’s complacent logic. Regulation does not weaken democracy; it defends it. If we shy away from regulation, we risk opening the door not just to interference from hostile states, but to ideological actors in the US who have already shown they are more than willing to meddle.
Fergus Ryan is a senior analyst in ASPI’s Cyber, Technology and Security program. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
