An underreported skill in politics: using international legitimacy to bury a domestic crisis.
Sánchez this week is a clinic in narrative displacement: don’t rebut a damaging frame, change the arena where the questions get asked.
Bar chart showing that majorities in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland support replacing US technology with European alternatives across servers and data storage, video conferencing, and payment systems. Support ranges from 46% to 68%, with Poland consistently lowest and Italy and Germany among the highest. Source: YouGov, March 2026.
The demand for European tech is real. The infrastructure, the awareness, and the political will haven't fully caught up yet. Is "digital sovereignty" about to become a campaign slogan?
www.techpolicy.press/almost-two-t...
What the latest US verdicts likely will change for Europe are the speed of EU regulatory #enforcement timelines, stronger political #will to tackle platforms’ harmful design, and Meta’s reduced ability to argue in any proceeding that its choices were benign or unintentional.
The verdicts are morally and rhetorically powerful for Europe, but they won’t open floodgates of civil lawsuits the same way they might in US courts.
One important caveat: the legal pathway in Europe is different. The US verdicts are from private lawsuits addressing individual harm with punitive damages. European enforcement under the DSA is based on regulatory systemic risk obligations and Commission investigations, fines up to 6% of turnover.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, as Meta’s lead EU regulator under #GDPR, is also relevant here. The accountability principle under Article 5(2) requires Meta to actively demonstrate compliance, which the New Mexico evidence of #concealment directly undermines.
European regulators have similar disclosure powers. The question is whether they use them.
The tools to hold platforms accountable exist in Europe: the #DSA has been in force since 2023 for very large platforms, and the Commission has open proceedings against Meta. However, none of this has produced findings of the weight US juries have now delivered, twice, in a single week.
That logic matches almost perfectly how the Digital Services Act frames systemic risk obligations: Article 34 requires very large online platforms (VLOPs) to assess risks arising from their own design, not just third-party content.
So?
What makes these rulings significant is that they treat platforms as manufacturers of defective products, like tobacco. The liability is in the #design (infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic amplification) instead of individual pieces of content.
This week’s US rulings found that Meta knew about the addictive nature of their products, and how they were used to lead children to sexually explicit content and mentally harmful content. Meta acted with malice to conceal this, which considerably strengthens the Commission’s hand.
The verdicts arrive while @ec.europa.eu is already pursuing Meta under the #DSA for the same features at issue in the US trials: infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation, and behavioural addiction mechanisms.
Two landmark verdicts in a week against Meta: one in California for #addictively designing platforms harming children’s mental health, and one in New Mexico for concealing child sexual #exploitation.
What are the implications for Europe?
VdL says Europe must “shape the new world.” Kallas says the rulebook has been “thrown out the window.” Both are right in diagnosis. Neither names who threw it.
That silence is exactly why nobody believes Europe will actually do what it says.
Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father Ali Khamenei as supreme leader, signaling that hardliners remain firmly in charge, as the week-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran sent oil prices surging and Asian stock markets into a nosedive. Follow our live coverage: reut.rs/4d98ssP
AI didn’t kill the demand for trustworthy information, it exploded it, argues @shuwei.bsky.social.
Billions of people can now reach knowledge but still can’t make sense of it.
The companies filling that gap right now aren’t exactly trustworthy.
The market is wide open. 👇🏼
"If the defense department is demanding the use of AI for mass surveillance or autonomous warfare that we, the public, find unacceptable, that should tell us we need to pass new legal restrictions on those military activities."
https://bit.ly/4blSRF0
Belgium’s defence minister says US-Israel strikes are “righteous “.
Iran says the same about its proxies. Russia says the same about Ukraine.
International law exists precisely because everyone thinks their cause is just, and that’s why “it’s righteous” has never been a legal basis for force.
Know an interesting book about diplomacy or global affairs you want to review for @haguediplomacyjrnl.bsky.social ? 📚
For 2026, we particularly welcome book reviews that explore perspectives from the global majority.
More info here: www.universiteitleiden.nl/hjd/journal/...
About right time to recommend again the last episode of "Post truth be told" on wether and how the EU has a strategy to counter foreign interference...
EU leaders spent years framing the energy crisis as a matter of principle: Russia violated int’l law, destabilised the rules-based order.
Now gas prices double, triggered by illegal US-Israel strikes, and Brussels endorses.
The incoherence is absolutely astounding.
@vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu
US officials skeptical of regime change in Tehran after Khamenei killing, say sources reut.rs/4l2wasX
“Historically, Washington’s poorly informed assumptions on Iran have set back core US interests. Most notable was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which lacked adequate preparation & manpower to manage a stable transition & insulate the new government from Iranian influence”
🔗 www.cfr.org/reports/lead...
Once again, EU leadership utterly fails to address the illegal and reckless use of force employed by US and Israel, this time in Iran.
I’m grateful to be surrounded by scholars who are brave and honest, two qualities much needed at the top of EU institutions.
The @europarl.europa.eu is “going nowhere” on the digital euro.
Meanwhile, the EU still pays Visa & Mastercard over €13.5 billion a year to process its own payments.
We’re “renting core infrastructure” as put by @ecb.europa.eu exec in a recent interview with me: sophiepomme.com/reshaping-eu...
Amodei’s statement today deserves careful reading. @anthropic.com says it refuses to enable mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons on democratic grounds.
One of the largest tech companies is publicly defending civil liberties against government pressure, and this is meaningful.
Truth functions like a social contract: invisible until broken. The moment we stop maintaining it collectively, politics turn into theatre, and the audience forgets it ever had a say.
Orbán is playing two games: calling for a “fact-finding mission” in a formal letter to EU Council president Costa, while accusing Zelenskyy of interfering in Hungarian elections on social media. The gap between his diplomatic and political tone tells you everything about what’s driving this crisis.
