A clash between Poland’s right-wing president and its centrist ruling coalition over the European Union’s flagship social media law is putting the country further at risk of multimillion euro fines from Brussels. President Karol Nawrocki is holding up a bill that would implement the EU’s Digital Services Act, a tech law that allows regulators to police how social media firms moderate content. Nawrocki, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said in a statement that the law would “give control of content on the internet to officials subordinate to the government, not to independent courts.” The government coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Nawrocki’s rival, warned this further exposed them to the risk of EU fines as high as €9.5 million. Deputy Digital Minister Dariusz Standerski said in a TV interview that, “since the president decided to veto this law, I’m assuming he is also willing to have these costs [of a potential fine] charged to the budget of the President’s Office.” Nawrocki’s refusal to sign the bill brings back bad memories of Warsaw’s years-long clash with Brussels over the rule of law, a conflict that began when Nawrocki’s Law and Justice party rose to power in 2015 and started reforming the country’s courts and regulators. The EU imposed €320 million in penalties on Poland from 2021-2023. Warsaw was already in a fight with the Commission over its slow implementation of the tech rulebook since 2024, when the EU executive put Poland on notice for delaying the law’s implementation and for not designating a responsible authority. In May last year Brussels took Warsaw to court over the issue. If the EU imposes new fines over the rollout of digital rules, it would “reignite debates reminiscent of the rule-of-law mechanism and frozen funds disputes,” said Jakub Szymik, founder of Warsaw-based non-profit watchdog group CEE Digital Democracy Watch. Failure to implement the tech law could in the long run even lead to fines and penalties accruing over time, as happened when Warsaw refused to reform its courts during the earlier rule of law crisis. The European Commission said in a statement that it “will not comment on national legislative procedures.” It added that “implementing the [Digital Services Act] into national law is essential to allow users in Poland to benefit from the same DSA rights.” “This is why we have an ongoing infringement procedure against Poland” for its “failure to designate and empower” a responsible authority, the statement said. Under the tech platforms law, countries were supposed to designate a national authority to oversee the rules by February 2024. Poland is the only EU country that hasn’t moved to at least formally agree on which regulator that should be. The European Commission is the chief regulator for a group of very large online platforms, including Elon Musk’s X, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, Chinese-owned TikTok and Shein and others. But national governments have the power to enforce the law on smaller platforms and certify third parties for dispute resolution, among other things. National laws allow users to exercise their rights to appeal to online platforms and challenge decisions. When blocking the bill last Friday, Nawrocki said a new version could be ready within two months. But that was “very unlikely … given that work on the current version has been ongoing for nearly two years and no concrete alternative has been presented” by the president, said Szymik, the NGO official. The Digital Services Act has become a flashpoint in the political fight between Brussels and Washington over how to police online platforms. The EU imposed its first-ever fine under the law on X in December, prompting the U.S. administration to sanction former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other Europeans. Nawrocki last week likened the law to “the construction of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s novel 1984,” a criticism that echoed claims by Trump and his top MAGA officials that the law censored conservatives and right-wingers. Bartosz Brzeziński contributed reporting.

WARSAW — Poland’s nationalist President Karol Nawrocki on Friday sided with his ally U.S. President Donald Trump to veto legislation on enforcing the EU’s social media law, which is hated by the American administration. Trump and his top MAGA officials condemn the EU’s Digital Services Act — which seeks to force big platforms like Elon Musk’s X, Facebook, Instagram to moderate content — as a form of “Orwellian” censorship against conservative and right-wingers. The presidential veto stops national regulators in Warsaw from implementing the DSA and sets Nawrocki up for a a clash with centrist pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Tusk’s parliamentary majority passed the legislation introducing the DSA in Poland. Nawrocki argued that while the bill’s stated aim of protecting citizens — particularly minors — was legitimate, the Polish bill would grant excessive power to government officials over online content, resulting in “administrative censorship.”  “I want this to be stated clearly: a situation in which what is allowed on the internet is decided by an official subordinate to the government resembles the construction of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s novel 1984,” Nawrocki said in a statement — echoing the U.S.’s stance on the law. Nawrocki also warned that allowing authorities to decide what constitutes truth or disinformation would erode freedom of expression “step by step.” He called for a revised draft that would protect children while ensuring that disputes over online speech are settled by independent courts. Deputy Prime Minister and Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski dismissed Nawrocki’s position, accusing the president of undermining online safety and siding with digital platforms.  “The president has vetoed online safety,” Gawkowski told a press briefing Friday afternoon, arguing the law would have protected children from predators, families from disinformation and users from opaque algorithms.  The minister also rejected Nawrocki’s Orwellian comparisons, saying the bill explicitly relied on ordinary courts rather than officials to rule on online content. Gawkowski said Poland is now among the few EU countries without national legislation enabling effective enforcement of the DSA and pledged that the government would continue to pursue new rules. The clash comes as enforcement of the social media law has become a flashpoint in EU-U.S. relations.  Brussels has already fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for breaching the law, prompting a furious response from Washington, including travel bans imposed by the Trump administration on former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, an architect of the tech law, and four disinformation experts. The DSA allows fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s global revenue and, as a measure of last resort, temporary bans on platforms. Earlier this week, the European Commission expanded its investigation into X’s AI service Grok after it started posting a wave of non-consensual sexualized pictures of people in response to X users’ requests. The European Commission’s digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the EU executive would not comment on national legislative procedures. “Implementing the DSA into national law is essential to allow users in Poland to benefit from the same DSA rights, such as challenging platforms if their content is deleted or their account suspended,” he said. “This is why we have an ongoing infringement procedure against Poland. We have referred Poland to the Court of Justice of the EU for failure to designate and empower the Digital Services Coordinator,” in May 2025, Regnier added. Gawkowski said that the government would make a quick decision on what to do next with the vetoed bill but declined to offer specifics on what a new bill would look like were it to be submitted to parliament again. Tusk four-party coalition does not have enough votes in parliament to override Nawrocki’s vetoes. That has created a political deadlock over key legislation efforts by the government, which stands for reelection next year. Nawrocki, meanwhile, is aiming to help the Law and Justice (PiS) political party he’s aligned with to retake power after losing to Tusk in 2023. Mathieu Pollet contributed reporting.

Meta and TikTok have dealt a blow to the European Commission’s social media rule book, pressing the EU executive to codify how it calculates the number of users on online platforms. The General Court at the Court of Justice of the European Union sided with the social media companies on Wednesday in their challenge of an annual supervisory fee the European Union charges to pay for the enforcement of its tech rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). It’s the first major court loss for the Commission over the DSA, which entered into force in 2022 and can be wielded to fine social media and e-commerce platforms up to 6 percent of their global annual revenue. The EU has yet to finalize investigations under the law. At the heart of the case are platforms’ disagreements with how the EU calculated the fee. The Commission directly supervises “very large online platforms” with over 45 million average monthly users in the bloc. Meta and TikTok challenged the European Commission’s decisions imposing so-called supervisory fees in 2024. These fees are meant to support the Commission’s work overseeing the very platforms that pay it — an extension of the “polluter pays” principle often used in environmental policy — and are proportionate to the number of users platforms have in the EU. The EU’s General Court said in its ruling the Commission should have passed a separate set of rules about how users are calculated before determining the fees. Judges gave the Commission a year to draft a text on how it calculates platform users, or else potentially refund the platforms’ 2023 fees. The EU executive has already been working on such rules, called a delegated act. The Commission said the court merely ruled against it on procedure and not substance. “The Court confirms our methodology is sound: no error in calculation, no suspension of any payments, no problem with the principle of the fee nor the amount,” said spokesperson Thomas Regnier. Meta said in a statement that the judgement “will force the European Commission to reassess the unfair methodology being used to calculate these DSA fees,” adding it “looks forward to the flaws in the methodology being addressed.” TikTok “welcomed” the decision and will “closely follow the development” of the case, company spokesperson Paolo Ganino said.

BRUSSELS — EU institutions can no longer continue tense talks on new rules to combat corporate greenwashing after Italy decided to withdraw its support for the bill. The decision means a landmark EU law clamping down on companies making misleading environmental claims is all but dead. “We have been instructed to communicate to you that Italy does not support the adoption of the proposal and supports a withdrawal of it by the Commission,” Italy told the Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU over the weekend, in a text seen by POLITICO. Tiemo Wölken, a German socialist MEP coordinating talks for the Parliament, said Italy had been “supportive of the file,” but withdrew support after a confusing series of announcements from the European Commission, which signaled it would withdraw its proposal on Friday. Italy’s move means that the Polish Presidency, which runs the negotiations on behalf of EU countries, no longer has enough support from EU governments to push ahead in the negotiations. On Sunday evening, POLITICO reported that the negotiations — which were due to continue on Monday — had been paused because of “too many doubts” and a lack of clarity on the European Commission’s intentions. The European Commission said it would scrap the proposed Green Claims Directive because it does not agree with a decision to include micro-enterprises in the scope of the rules. The law would require companies to provide evidence to back up any environmental claims they make. The news immediately sparked confusion among EU diplomats and lawmakers, who said it was unclear whether this meant that the Commission would continue negotiations or not. On Monday, the Commission denied that it planned on withdrawing the proposal before the final round of talks with MEPs and with EU countries. A spokesperson for the Italian government did not respond at time of publication.

The Dutch government on Tuesday said children under 15 years old should not have access to social media like TikTok and Instagram. Children over 13 should be able to learn how to use “social interaction platforms” like WhatsApp and Signal, the Dutch government said in new guidelines to help parents handle screen time and social apps. But when it comes to social media, the government advises to wait until the age of 15, it said in a press release. The Netherlands is one of several European Union countries that is taking action against the effects of social media on minors’ mental health and development. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been vocal about a minimum age of 15 for social media use, and Greece and Spain also support tougher rules. The European Commission has released its own guidelines on the protection of minors online, but many member states appear unhappy with the pace of progress at the EU level. Social interaction platforms like chat apps play a “positive role” as children over 12 develop their social identities, offering “space for social interaction with peers and for self-expression,” the Dutch guidelines said. The guidelines also recommended limiting children’s screen time, starting from half an hour per day for two-to-four-year-olds and gradually increasing to three hours per day for children over 12. Parents and educators should also practice healthy screen time habits to set the example for children, the guidelines said, including putting their phones away and turning notifications off when they are with minors. The Dutch Parliament asked for the guidelines back in February.

PARIS — France’s President Emmanuel Macron is set on banning kids from social media.   All that stands in his way are legal fights, glitchy tech, a powerful lobby of Big Tech and Big Porn — and kids being kids.  Macron said late Tuesday that France “can’t wait” any longer in banning social media for children under 15, in response to the fatal stabbing of a teaching assistant at a high school in the suburbs of Paris. The stabbing came one month after a teenager killed a student in a similar incident at a high school in Nantes.   The incidents have determined the French government to keep kids away from what it considers harmful content, and has made France the epicenter of a fierce debate across Europe and the West over imposing limits on social media and smartphone use to better protect children online.  In the past year, Macron’s government has pushed to bar smartphones from schools and to limit screen use in nurseries. It has even gone head to head with the world’s biggest porn platforms, forcing them to verify their users’ age — a high-stakes move that prompted the owner of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn to stop serving porn in France earlier this month.   But the French crusade has also put Paris on a collision course with Brussels regulators, privacy rights groups and social media platforms.   Here’s what stands in the way of Macron and a French ban on social media for kids:   1. PARIS IS HEADED FOR A CLASH WITH BRUSSELS Paris insists it really wants an EU-wide regime, and Macron himself has said that banning kids would be a “European competence.”  “I’m giving us a few months to achieve European mobilization. Otherwise, I will negotiate with the Europeans so that we can do it ourselves in France,” the French president said Tuesday.  The government has launched a campaign to pressure other European countries to follow its example, with digital minister Clara Chappaz taking the lead.  “France cannot play it solo because member states have lost most of their competences” on regulating social media platforms, said Thibault Douville, a professor of French digital law.  In Brussels, though, European Union officials aren’t warming to the idea of an all-out ban for kids.   The Commission is readying its own measures on age verification, including guidelines and an app, but a social media ban is not foreseen. | STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images “Let’s be clear … [a] wide social media ban is not what the European Commission is doing. It’s not where we are heading to. Why? Because this is the prerogative of our member states,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters Wednesday.  Minors protection online is covered by the Digital Services Act, an EU-wide regulation that gives supervisory powers over Very Large Online Platforms such as major social media to the European Commission.   The Commission is readying its own measures on age verification, including guidelines and an app, but a social media ban is not foreseen.   EU countries can set a digital age of majority under the EU’s landmark privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation, Regnier said. “Of course, member states can go for that option.”   Under Article 8 of the GDPR, EU countries can set a minimum user age for platforms to process their data, provided it is over 13. But data can still be processed if parents give their consent, the law says.  On paper, this GDPR article bars minors under that age from accessing social media, but it leaves it up to the platforms to decide how to comply with this “digital majority.”  Ultimately, the Commission may have to challenge any French law imposing a ban — depending on its shape — which could lead to a long legal tussle.  2. WATCHDOGS WARN OF SURVEILLANCE  To block kids from porn sites, France passed measures requiring that platforms verify age online using a double-blind method: where an independent age checker knows the person’s details, but not what platform they want to visit.   That has won the approval of the country’s CNIL data protection regulator, which found it protected privacy sufficiently.  But the privacy watchdog has stressed that age checks on the internet should only happen in specific contexts, such as when there are risks to minors.    If age verification creeps into more general use it could “lead to the establishment of a closed digital world, in which individuals would have to constantly prove their age, or even their identity, leading to significant risks to their rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression,” the regulator has warned.    Andy Yen, the chief executive officer of privacy technology company Proton, told POLITICO that “we’re really not debating age verification for children, we’re debating whether it makes sense to do age verification for everyone. And if you do age verification on everyone, there are definitely privacy and security considerations that come as a result of that.”   Within half an hour of the suspension, ProtonVPN saw registrations increase by 1,000 percent, the VPN service said in a post on X. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images Trying to gauge someone’s age by profiling their activities online or using AI to estimate it from a selfie involves gathering huge amounts of information, said Urs Buscke, senior legal officer with European consumer organization BEUC. He said this conflicted with the GDPR’s key principle of data minimization, where data is only collected if it is strictly necessary. 3. THE TECH SECTOR ISN’T QUITE READY YET  For regulators and tech firms alike, enforcing a social media ban for kids is a nightmare.  Despite legal protections, almost half of children under 10 have social media accounts in Denmark, the country’s digital minister Caroline Stage Olsen said last week.  “There is no data” to suggest that these sorts of bans are effective, said Jessica Piotrowski, chair of the University of Amsterdam’s School of Communication Research and an adviser to YouTube on the issue of minors protection.   Instead, there is “some data that actually suggests, when you try to ban, it can actually do them harm, because [minors] find other ways instead,” Piotrowski said. To make matters worse, Big Tech firms have clashed heavily over who should be responsible for checking the ages of internet users.   On the one side, Meta as well as porn platforms and others claim it should be up to companies running operating systems — most notably Apple, through its mobile system iOS, and Google through Android.   On the other, the owners of operating systems say the social media apps themselves have a responsibility to stop harmful content from reaching minors.   Some technologies used to check the age of internet users are having growing pains as well. Research out this month claimed that Yoti, a leading age verification app that counts Meta among its customers, is “extensively tracking users without consent” and was operating with chinks in its cyber armor that “potentially could be manipulated by third parties.”   In response, Yoti said it had passed the information on to be investigated, but added that researchers had drawn “certain conclusions and extrapolations that are incorrect and potentially harmful to public confidence in a technology built with the intention of promoting and supporting online safety.”  The European Commission, meanwhile, is developing its own age verification app, but it remains in the testing phase in countries like Denmark, Italy, France, Greece and Spain. 4. KIDS WILL FIND A WAY The clearest data point showing that Paris faces an uphill battle came in the hours and days after porn platforms stopped serving adult content in France.   Virtual private networks, which allow internet users to bypass geographic restrictions, saw a surge in demand after Aylo Freesites, the parent company of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn, suspended the sites for French users this month.  Within half an hour of the suspension, ProtonVPN saw registrations increase by 1,000 percent, the VPN service said in a post on X. Demand for VPNs overall increased by 334 percent on June 4 compared to the average of the 28 previous days, ranking site Top10VPN said.  Whatever Macron’s plans, you can count on kids to figure out any and all possible ways to thwart them.  Eliza Gkritsi and Ellen O’Regan reported from Brussels. Émile Marzolf and Klara Durand reported from Paris. Pieter Haeck contributed reporting from Brussels. 

The European Commission on Wednesday said it is ultimately up to national governments to block minors from social media, leaving the door open for France to ban under-15s. France’s President Emmanuel Macron late on Tuesday said France “can’t wait” any longer in banning social media for children under 15, in response to a fatal stabbing of a teaching assistant at a high school in Paris’ suburbs. The president has called for a social media ban before. On Tuesday, he dialed up pressure on European Union officials and other EU countries to design an EU-wide system to check the age of social media users, saying: “I’m giving us a few months to achieve European mobilization. Otherwise, I will negotiate with the Europeans so that we can do it ourselves in France.” The response from Brussels? It’s your call, Mr. President. “Let’s be clear … [a] wide social media ban is not what the European Commission is doing. It’s not where we are heading to. Why? Because this is the prerogative of our member states,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters Wednesday. EU countries can set a digital age of majority under the EU’s landmark privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation, said Regnier. “Of course, member states can go for that option,” Regnier said. Under the GDPR, EU countries can set the minimum users age for platforms to process their data, provided it is over 13. But data can still be processed if parents give their consent, the law says. Adding to France’s woes is that, without a technical way to man the gates, these measures have proven ineffective. In Denmark, almost half of kids under 10 have social media accounts and almost all have signed up for social media by the age of 13, the country’s Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen said last week. However, requirements on social media platforms to protect minors are also covered by the Digital Services Act, a regulation that centralizes supervisory powers for major platforms at the hands of the Commission. “We want to make the digital space safe but also need to tackle risks coming from it. This is where the DSA comes into place,” Regnier said. The EU executive has been working on EU-wide guidelines for how platforms can comply with the DSA on minors’ protection, to be finalized before the summer break. The Commission is also working on an age verification app to be trialed by five countries, including France. France and other EU countries appear unhappy with the Commission’s pace. Denmark, which will chair meetings of the Council of the EU from July to December, is also planning to fast-track discussions about minor protections online in coming months.

French President Emmanuel Macron said late Tuesday that he will ban social media for under-15s in France “in the coming months” if progress isn’t forthcoming at EU level. Greece, backed by France and Spain, is spearheading efforts to get the EU to significantly limit the amount of time teenagers can spend online. But Macron, speaking to the French public after the murder of a teaching assistant in a high school Tuesday morning, wants to move faster. “We cannot wait,” Macron said, speaking on France 2 after the killing in Nogent, Haute-Marne. He also announced that age verification will soon be imposed in France on sites selling knives online, similar to measures that currently apply to pornographic sites. “A 15-year-old will no longer be able to buy a knife online. That means we’re going to impose massive financial sanctions and bans,” he promised. Earlier, Prime Minister François Bayrou had announced he wanted to quickly take steps to ban the sale of “all knives” to minors. Later in the evening, posting on X, Macron said: “I’m banning social media for children under 15. Platforms have the ability to verify age. Let’s do it.” French authorities are already progressing with efforts to force certain social media sites — including X, Reddit, Bluesky and Mastodon — to introduce age verification, by classifying them as pornographic websites. French measures forcing porn sites to verify their users’ ages came into effect on June 7, prompting the world’s largest porn website, Pornhub, to stop operating in France. Demand for virtual private network services, which allow users to trick websites into thinking they are in a different location, immediately surged.

The owner of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn plans to stop serving adult content to French users as soon as Wednesday afternoon, in protest of government measures forcing it to verify the age of its visitors. Aylo Freesites’ platforms will display a message that will explain its decision to its French audience, including that it doesn’t want to jeopardize the privacy of its users, company officials told reporters on Tuesday. Aylo Freesites, like other porn platforms, is under a legal obligation to implement age verification solutions by June 7. The restriction is part of measures by the French government to shield minors from inappropriate content passed in 2023. The industry giant has fought French officials tooth and nail over the measures. The French audience is Pornhub’s second-largest in the world, after the United States and ahead of the Philippines, Mexico and the United Kingdom, its own internal 2024 statistics showed. Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners, which owns Aylo, told reporters in a Tuesday briefing the French law was “dangerous,” “potentially privacy infringing” and “ineffective.” “It’s a matter of putting our values first, and that means communicating directly with the French people to tell them what their government is refusing to tell them,” Friedman said. The European Commission is also working on another age verification solution and has accused Aylo platforms of breaching its Digital Services Act around minor protection. Aylo — like social media platform Meta — is calling for device-level age verification. “We are eager to work with operating system manufacturers, app stores, other tech partners, to ensure that only adults are accessing the platform. It’s not a matter of not wanting to take responsibility. It’s a matter of saying that you need to block access at the source,” said Friedman. France’s Digital Minister Clara Chappaz accused Aylo of lying about the French measures, which she said were privacy-preserving, in a Tuesday post on X. “Lying when one does not want to comply with the law and holding others hostage is unacceptable. Adults are free to consume pornography, but not at the expense of protecting our children,” she said. Aylo did not specify how long the suspension would last and added it hoped to find a solution to unblock its adult content in France soon.

Elon Musk’s X has challenged a German court decision that instructed the platform to share data with researchers, the court confirmed to POLITICO. In an urgent injunction, the Berlin Regional Court last Thursday instructed X to share real-time access to the data on the upcoming German elections via its online interface until Feb. 25.  The case is one of the first major judicial tests of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark social media regulation. The plaintiffs, Democracy Reporting International (DRI) and the Society for Civil Rights (GFF), alleged that X hindered them from tracking potential election interference by not granting them access to key engagement data such as likes, shares and visibility metrics. “X challenges whether the German court is competent to hear the case, given that X’s HQ is in Ireland. The company has not provided data access and our window to conduct the study before the elections is closing,” DRI’s Executive Director Michael Meyer-Resende said in a reaction. The court said a hearing is likely to follow X’s objection but that no date has been set. X did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment. The DSA requires that platforms share data with researchers for certain studies. The Commission already accused X in July last year of breaching the DSA for not meeting requirements around data access. It also quizzed Meta last year over its decision to shut down research tool CrowdTangle. Multiple reports by civil society organizations have found evidence of Russia-backed foreign interference in Germany’s election scheduled to take place on Sunday Feb. 23.