Diana Năsulea // 09 December 2025

On 5 December 2025, the European Commission announced its first-ever Digital Services Act (DSA) non-compliance decision, issuing a €120 million fine to X (formerly Twitter). According to the official press release, the sanction rests on three findings:

1. The “deceptive design” of X’s blue checkmark system,
2. The lack of transparency in X’s advertising repository, and
3. Insufficient access to public data for researchers.

Legally, the Commission accuses X of breaching Articles 25, 39, and 40 of the DSA. Politically, however, the implications reach far beyond interface design. The decision lands at a moment of intense sensitivity in EU-US relations, just one day after Washington unveiled its new National Security Strategy (NSS). This coincidence has shaped both the American reaction and the diplomatic mood. What might otherwise have been treated as a technical enforcement step has instead become a transatlantic flashpoint.

Musk’s Reaction: “Censorship,” “Double Standards,” and a Challenge to EU Legitimacy

Elon Musk responded immediately and aggressively. In one post he called the fine “bullshit,” in another he argued that the EU “should be abolished,” and throughout the day he framed the decision as ideological punishment against a platform that refuses to censor speech “on demand.” He also claimed, without producing documentation, that the Commission had privately offered X an “illegal secret deal” to avoid penalties if the platform agreed to censor more content without disclosure, asserting that other platforms accepted such arrangements while X refused to do so.

He escalated further by temporarily deactivating the European Commission’s advertising account, a symbolic gesture framed as retaliation against unfair and opaque demands.

Whether one accepts or rejects this narrative, Musk’s framing resonates strongly among segments of US political leadership. It reinforces the view that Brussels is using regulation not to protect consumers, but to discipline American companies.

Reactions from US Leadership: Digital Regulation as a Geopolitical Fault Line

The US response was unusually coordinated and sharply worded. Trump himself, alongside senior officials including Vice-President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and key State Department figures criticized the EU for weaponising regulation against American firms. Their reactions echoed concerns raised earlier in the year by the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff report, The Foreign Censorship Threat (2025), which argued that the DSA enables European authorities to exert extraterritorial influence over American speech norms.

According to this emerging consensus in Washington, EU digital regulation is no longer regarded as technocratic rulemaking. Instead, it is understood as a mixture of industrial policy, values promotion, and, more troublingly for US policymakers, a potential tool for shaping global speech in ways incompatible with the First Amendment.

This interpretation may or may not reflect the Commission’s intentions, but it defines the political context in which the DSA now operates.

The Timing: A Collision with Trump’s New Security Strategy

Timing is everything. And this fine arrives almost at the same time with President Trump’s updated National Security Strategy. The document contains three messages that directly intersect with the DSA dispute:

• Protection of American tech platforms as strategic assets
• Resistance to foreign regulatory influence over U.S. information flows
• A civilisational narrative about Europe’s future, which sparked immediate controversy

The NSS explicitly warns that

"The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty. This includes preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations, attempts by foreign powers or entities to censor our discourse or curtail our citizens’ free speech rights”.

Against this backdrop, Brussels’s enforcement action has been interpreted by some in Washington not as a routine regulatory step but as a symbolic counter-move, especially because X, under Musk, has become a politically charged platform in US domestic debates.

While the timing is almost certainly coincidental (the Commission’s investigations and draft decisions are prepared months in advance), perception matters, and the Washington perception is that this fine arrived in the middle of a strategic confrontation over sovereignty in the digital realm.

Europe Pushes Back: “We Reject U.S. Interference.”

The diplomatic temperature rose further when European Council President Costa openly rebuked the U.S. strategy. He warned Washington not to interfere in EU internal affairs, rejecting parts of the Trump administration’s NSS that suggested Europe risks “civilisational erasure.”

This unusually blunt exchange reinforces the idea that disagreements over digital regulation cannot be separated from broader questions of identity, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy. The DSA is now embedded within that larger debate.

The Underlying Problem: The DSA is too vague to avoid political conflict

The X case also exposes a deeper issue: the DSA’s foundational ambiguity.

1. “Deceptive design” is inherently subjective

Article 25 prohibits any interface that “deceives or manipulates” users or “impairs their ability to make free and informed decisions.”

This language, borrowed from consumer-protection and dark-pattern literature, sounds reasonable in theory but lacks concrete criteria. It provides no test for:

• what level of confusion counts as deception,
• what kinds of user expectations matter,
• how much evidence is required,
• or whether intent is relevant.

The Commission’s argument about the blue checkmark relies on assumed user expectations rather than empirical findings. Reasonable regulators may disagree; reasonable courts certainly will.

2. The DSA blends safety, competition, and content moderation

This makes enforcement unpredictable. When platforms do not know whether a design choice will later be interpreted as “undermining user rights,” compliance becomes a moving target.

3. A regulation with undefined concepts scales unpredictably

Because the DSA is designed for very large platforms, every ambiguity in the legal text becomes exponentially more consequential. The more political the environment becomes, the more easily enforcement risks appearing selective or strategic.

4. More fines are structurally inevitable

The Commission has positioned itself as both the investigator and the interpreter of novel concepts like “deceptive design,” “systemic risks,” and “trusted flaggers.” With no case law yet developed, the early years of the DSA will be characterised by:

• exploratory enforcement,
• uneven expectations,
• and recurring disputes with platforms (often American ones).

In practice, the DSA cannot be as clear as it claims to be. It governs a domain, namely digital interface design, that evolves faster than regulatory doctrine, and it does so using legal concepts that depend on behavioural assumptions regulators cannot standardise.

Why This Matters for Transatlantic Relations

The EU and the US have spent the last two decades moving between periods of cooperation and conflict on tech policy: Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield, antitrust cases, GDPR, digital taxation proposals, the DMA, and now the DSA.

What makes the present moment uniquely delicate is the strategic reframing happening in Washington. The United States increasingly sees digital platforms as national-security assets, and control over information flows as a matter of geopolitical competition. Within this context, EU regulation is no longer viewed as purely technocratic; in many American policy circles it is interpreted as an instrument of industrial strategy and, at times, as an extraterritorial attempt to shape global speech norms. At the same time, European leaders are now openly pushing back against what they perceive as US interference in internal European debates about sovereignty and identity.

Against this backdrop, any major DSA enforcement (especially against a politically symbolic American platform) is liable to be read as a provocation, regardless of the legal merits of the case. The €120 million fine on X therefore becomes more than a regulatory milestone. It is an early demonstration of the friction points that will determine whether the DSA can function sustainably alongside an increasingly assertive US strategic doctrine.

Conclusion: A Need for Regulatory Humility and Diplomatic Caution

Whether one agrees with Musk or the Commission, one conclusion is unavoidable: the DSA was not designed with sufficient legal precision to avoid high-profile disputes. The Commission’s first enforcement decision may be internally coherent, but it rests on regulatory ground that remains fundamentally unsettled.

Europe must now recognise that vague standards inevitably produce unpredictable enforcement, that subjective concepts such as “deceptive design” invite contestation, and that a regulation built on behavioural assumptions cannot deliver stable, consistent outcomes. The X case is not an anomaly, but an illustration of the structural ambiguity embedded within the DSA itself.

If the goal is to promote a safer and more transparent online environment, the answer is not more rules but better rules, those rooted in clear definitions, limited mandates, and evidence-based thresholds. Regulators should exercise restraint, especially when dealing with platforms whose size and visibility can turn legal ambiguity into large-scale conflict.

Ultimately, the lesson of the X case is straightforward: overregulation is not a path to trust or stability. Without a more focused and disciplined approach, the DSA risks creating uncertainty for users, burdens for businesses, and disputes that distract from genuine harms. Clarity, not expansion, is what Europe’s digital governance needs most.

Diana Năsulea is a Programmes Manager and Researcher at IES Europe.