Vance’s week of waging war on EU tech law

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MUNICH — From Paris to Munich, JD Vance devoted his first trip overseas to ripping apart Europe’s tech regulatory playbook — page by page.

In a speech that shocked attendees at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, the United States vice president lambasted European Union policies aimed at fighting disinformation and illegal content on social media, comparing the laws to Soviet-era censorship and calling the EU officials enforcing them “commissars.”

Vance’s Munich address came just days after he told Europe that its tech laws were holding back the development of artificial intelligence and stifling innovation, at the Paris AI Action Summit on Tuesday.

His remarks were the strongest U.S. rebuke of European tech regulation yet, following weeks of increasingly hostile rhetoric from President Donald Trump, X owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump and Zuckerberg have both likened fines on technology companies for breaching EU law to “tariffs.” Others blame EU digital laws for crippling free speech.

The European Commission’s response was muted. Its most senior tech policy official, Henna Virkkunen, repeated a line that its rules “are same for everybody, for European companies, for American companies, for Chinese companies.”

Vance felt no similar constraints.

Speaking just after Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday, he said: “I look at Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content.'”

Vance also dismissed European worries that foreign countries — notably Russia — are actively meddling in European democracies with hybrid campaigns, including on social media platforms.

Germany is heading for an election on Feb. 23, and officials and disinformation experts have flagged several coordinated efforts to influence the vote through disinformation.

Vance mocked the notion that such campaigns could derail elections. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

In his speech, Vance singled out Romania.

A first-round election in November resulted in a surprise victory for the far-right ultranationalist Călin Georgescu, in part thanks to a wildly successful TikTok campaign. The result was later annulled amid concerns over a Russian influence campaign.

“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance said.

Tech face-off, round 11

Vance’s Munich stop was just the latest case of the U.S. government pressuring the EU to tone down its enforcement of tech laws. In Paris on Tuesday, he insisted that Europe needs an approach that “fosters the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it.”

“To restrict it’s development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations,” Vance said in his first major trip overseas since taking office.  

The EU’s new law on social media, the Digital Services Act, comes with the threat of fines of up to 6 percent of global annual turnover — and Musk’s social media platform X is expected to be slapped with a fine in the law’s first investigation.

Social media giant Meta in past years was hit with monster fines, including a €1.2 billion penalty, for privacy violations; last November it was fined €797 million for breaching EU antitrust rules.

The European Commission has so far suffered the blows dealt to it by Washington without much response.

Asked by POLITICO what the EU thought of Vance’s speech, tech chief Virkkunen said the vice president was “misunderstanding that we are regulating the content on online platforms,” as that is something the bloc is “not doing.”

“The European Union has our own rules and legislations, and of course we will enforce them,” she said.

That muted response drew criticism from some European lawmakers over the weekend.

French liberal European Parliament member Nathalie Loiseau said “the European Commission should stop shying away.”

Damian Boeselager, European lawmaker for Germany’s left-wing Volt party, said it “is wasted communication chance to really assert European sovereignty, also in the digital space.”

Others were more lenient. “To start a direct confrontation with USA right now is probably not the smartest way to react,” said Christel Schaldemose, the Danish social-democrat lawmaker who led the drafting of the Digital Services Act.

According to Marietje Schaake, former liberal European Parliament member and tech expert at Stanford University, “the attacks on Europe should strengthen its resolve to deepen its digital sovereignty, and to become significantly less dependent on the technology companies that proudly support this confrontational White House.”

Laurens Cerulus reported from Munich. Eliza Gkritsi contributed reporting from Brussels. Antoaneta Roussi and Joshua Posaner contributed reporting from Munich.