One of the fundamental problems with censorship is that every regime of information control ever adopted in the public good is definitionally elitist. The basic structure is always the same: that some people are inherently capable of consuming information and analyzing it rationally and calmly, while others are not. It is the first group, almost always self-appointed, that censors the second.
It is simply impossible to find, for example, a person who supports the suppression of so-called hate speech who will admit to having been radicalized by hateful content themselves. The assumption is always that it must be others who are radicalized by such content, presumably on account of their inferior intellects and ability to rationally discuss ideas.
This inherent elitism is rarely better displayed or showcased than it is in the EU’s new “trusted flagger” system for regulating online content under the terms of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The Union has just published, as part of a limited public consultation, its guidelines for these trusted flaggers, which are expected to be organizations with relevant expertise that will “flag” to social media companies content which breaches EU law or imparts substantially false information to users. Those guidelines outline the process to be followed in a case of “best practice”:
"A provider of online platforms receives a precise and substantiated notice from a trusted flagger falling within the area of expertise of the trusted flagger. The provider, after diligently and objectively assessing the notice and concluding that it relates to illegal content, proceeds to remove the illegal content and informs both the trusted flagger and the recipient whose content has been removed. The provider makes sure that the content moderation action is recorded as relating to the relevant type of illegal content and as triggered by the notice of a trusted flagger in the statement of reasons sent to the recipient and in the transparency reports of the online platform pursuant to Article 15(1)(b) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065."
A Protected Caste and a Digital Militia
The first problem is simply that the European Union is creating a protected caste of citizens and organizations with far greater power and influence over online speech than their less privileged counterparts. Across the continent, this caste of people will be empowered to monitor the social media output of their friends, neighbors and colleagues, as well as that of fellow citizens, and will be granted policing rights over them.
It is, in effect, the creation of a kind of digital militia – a state-sanctioned online paramilitary force with quasi-policing powers over everybody else, and a privileged right of audience with social media companies. Those companies will then, in turn, be compelled to answer to Brussels if they do not comply with the directives of the local digital brownshirt.
As for the rest of the public, if they see objectionable or false or misleading content? Well, without trusted flagger status, they can safely be ignored.
Ideological Bias
It is not hard to imagine how this will work. Europeans have already experienced it for years. What is cast in theory as a group of well-intentioned, politically independent citizens acting on a voluntary basis to keep the public square clean of unhealthy discourse ends up being something very different in practice.
The trusted flaggers are to be “expert” groups under the policy, for example, but one might expect in practice that expert status will be granted much more quickly to a group of feminist academics than it might be granted to the somewhat less refined representatives of working-class communities concerned about crime, migration and housing.
Pressure on Social Media Companies
Experts have long argued that one of the reasons for the European Union’s relative poverty in terms of tech innovation in the 21st century is the high cost and burden of regulatory compliance.
In this latest proposal, we can see that in action: social media companies operating in the EU will have to put in place an architecture and an infrastructure to comply with their obligations to be accountable to trusted flaggers. In reality – due to cost pressures – it is likely that many of them will simply opt to comply with every removal request, rather than creating large policy teams to dispute and analyze every single complaint made.
This creates a fundamental inequality of advocacy: the EU is once again privileging its digital paramilitaries by ensuring that the targets of such speech suppression have no voice in the process.
There is, for example, no mechanism for a social media platform to contact a user or a group whose content has been flagged and to ask them to submit a defense against the flagging. This is a digital courtroom in which there are two people present: a committed prosecutor and a harassed, busy judge. There is to be no voice for the defense at the table when a person or a group is accused of digital wrongthink.
And why should social media companies care? The one thing that the EU is definitionally right about is that the concern of those companies is not usually for free speech or the public good, but for pure profit and reach. If a person in Slovenia has a post about transgenderism deleted because of the urging of a privileged group of activists, then the free speech rights of that person are not the concern of the social media company. Compliance is.
It is the EU which is supposed to protect the free speech right of the citizen. Instead, it is creating a fundamental inequality which discriminates against that right.
The normal order of justice is also being reversed. Freedom of expression is protected by the constitutions and laws of Europe’s member states, yet under this system a citizen’s speech may be reported by a privileged organization and removed by a private company without any court first ruling that it was unlawful. The citizen may still appeal, seek an out-of-court settlement or pursue judicial redress, but only after the platform has acted. The immediate burden therefore falls on the speaker to recover content that may have been lawful, rather than on those seeking its removal to establish their case before an independent court.
What Is the Citizen to Do?
To combat all of this, citizens themselves will have to be proactive. They will have to make the social media company justify the recommendation of the trusted flaggers. One citizen against the might of a social media company and a privileged group with the EU’s imprimatur. The odds are stacked.
One thing that might be hoped for is that at least some of the social media companies – perhaps most prominently X – might actually take their own duties more seriously than this column fears, and that some of them might devote actual resources to standing between the EU’s digital militia and the citizens they target. Continued pressure from the Trump administration on this issue is likely the best hope for now.
Yet Donald Trump will not be in the Oval Office forever. The regime being rolled out by Brussels is an indicator of what might come when a more compliant US administration takes office. Europeans concerned about this have a couple of years to get their campaigns and strategies in place. Otherwise, soon every citizen will be at the mercy of a privileged, European-endorsed speech police that is being quietly put in place, at this very moment.