Elon Musk is not acting alone. Powerful American Christian ultra-conservative actors are joining him in an attack on one of Europe’s most important safeguards for online spaces: the Digital Services Act (DSA).
ADF International has launched a legal challenge together with X against enforcement of the DSA. And that should concern us.
The DSA requires major online platforms to take responsibility for illegal content and to reduce risks linked to manipulation, hate speech, and harmful disinformation in Europe. Challenging the DSA is not just a technical legal move. It is an attack on the rules meant to keep online space safer and more accountable.
Deregulation means fewer barriers to making more profit.
The partnership is telling. ADF is a Christian ultra-conservative legal organisation with a long record of backing international attacks on the rights of others. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated it a hate group. Its lawyers were part of the legal team behind the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it is supporting activists opposing abortion buffer zones. They trained the speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson. Now ADF is helping to attack core European digital protections.
Musk, meanwhile, is one of the most politically active billionaires in the world. He has intervened publicly in political debates and elections across Europe and beyond, and supports the far right, including Germany’s AfD and Tommy Robinson in the UK.
So this is about more than X alone. It is about a broader coalition of platform power, ultra-conservative legal pressure, oligarchy, and far-right mobilisation seeking to weaken the protections that limit online manipulation, extremism, and disinformation.
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