BRUSSELS — Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he said the European Union was institutionalizing censorship, the bloc’s top tech official said.
“We know that it’s not true,” European Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO. “In Europe freedom of speech is one of our fundamental values and it’s also respected and protected [in] our Digital Services Act. So it’s very misleading also to say that.”
She was responding to Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta was calling time on its U.S. third-party fact-checking program. Meta owns Facebook, which has over 2 billion daily users.
“Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” Zuckerberg said.
The Finnish commissioner’s rebuttal is the strongest yet from an EU official, as U.S. tech giants such as Zuckerberg move to ingratiate themselves with incoming U.S. President Donald Trump.
Virkkunen, a politician from Finland’s ruling center-right National Coalition party, took office as the EU commissioner in charge of tech sovereignty, security and democracy on Dec. 1, after years as a member of the European Parliament.
She also said she would consider widening an ongoing EU investigation into whether Elon Musk’s X platform has breached the bloc’s social media rules. On X, Musk has repeatedly urged Germans to vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in an upcoming election.
The Commission formally charged Musk’s platform with failing to respect EU rules in July and is finalizing its decision — a first-of-its-kind verdict under the new tech law.
“Of course we have freedom of speech in Europe and [Musk] is free to express his views but then in the same time when it comes to X, X is having obligations under our Digital Services Act and X is supposed to assess and mitigate the risks they are posing to our electoral processes and to civic discourse,” Virkkunen said.
“We are also assessing whether the current scope of the investigation if it’s sufficient,” she added. “So if needed I don’t hesitate to take also further steps.”
Whether the EU will wrap up its long-running probe — which could ultimately see the EU fining X up to six percent of its annual revenue — before Germany’s election on Feb. 23 is difficult to say, she added.
Virkkunen said she did not watch Musk’s live conversation on X with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel Thursday. “I’ve never been very active on X,” she said.
