Brussels to go after X, Meta to face Kenyan courts and Substack's subtle shift
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your need-to-know news and analysis about platform policy, content moderation and internet regulation. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
Online speech, as a topic, can be sprawling; it's content as well as behaviour, norms as well as regulations, policies and design as well as enforcement. Most of us work on a narrow slice of it, which makes it all the more important to stay across the wider landscape.
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Here's everything you need to know from the last seven days — BW
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
The EU is preparing to throw the book at X/Twitter over its failure to combat illegal content and disinformation under the Digital Services Act. Commission sources say that an investigation that it opened at the end of 2023, and which it told X it was in breach of in July 2024, will come to a conclusion this summer. Tech Policy Press has a good summary of what will happen next.
Not going soft: There had been concerns that the Commission may go easy on US companies following Donald Trump’s election victory and his comments on EU regulation (EiM #276). But just this morning, EU President Ursula von der Leyen told the FT the DSA and Digital Markets Act are “untouchable” as part of US trade negotiations. Which sounds like game on.