U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio led a sharp rebuke on Friday, December 5th after Brussels imposed a €120 million fine on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Rubio described the European Commission penalty as “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” adding:
The days of censoring Americans online are over.
The sovereigntist European Parliament group Patriots for Europe echoed the criticism, claiming the Digital Services Act (DSA) was “a political weapon to silence dissent” and insisting: “Control is their goal.”
The fine, the first under the DSA relating to content, found X guilty of breaching transparency rules.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance pre-emptively warned Brussels against “attacking American companies over garbage,” a post Musk publicly acknowledged with approval.
The dispute unfolds amid Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which says Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” warning that, if current trends persist, the continent could become “unrecognisable” within two decades.