The Brussels Effect vs Tech Bros and the Far Right

meta, social media

Since the election of Donald Trump last year, US Tech Companies have been scrambling to get on the incoming president’s good side, with companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon donating millions of dollars to his inauguration.

At surface level, this might be surprising, considering that for Trump’s first term, most of these organisations were neutral or hostile to Trump’s policies.  At the time, Trump’s election was considered by some an aberration, a fluke of the electoral college – there was no possible way that his xenophobic and popularist policies would be representative of the real mood of the nation. He did lose the popular vote, after all, and the Senate was close enough to a 50:50 split. Thus, companies continued to pursue the relatively progressive policies from the Obama administrations, happy to promote equality for workers and advocate for LGBTQ+ individuals, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, as well as other marginalised groups.

During the past eight years, there have been some changes from the other side of the pond. The EU, long a regulatory giant overseeing a market of nearly a half billion people, legislated a series of ground-breaking acts including the General Data Protection Regulation (2018), the Digital Services Act (2022), the Digital Markets Act (2022), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (2024). These laws aim to protect consumer rights, curb monopolistic practices, and ensure ethical AI development.

When these acts were enforced, their reach is often considered global. Simplistically, this is for two reasons: Firstly, these pieces of legislation are applied with respect to European Union citizens, not just the people within the nations which comprise the EU itself. If an EU citizen is travelling to or living in, for instance, New Zealand, these acts will still apply. Secondly, the protections granted are very popular with people of not just EU citizens, but with other nations as well. The GDPR, for instance, has been used as a cornerstone for other regions like the UK, California, Japan, Brazil, etc. Worldwide adoption of EU law has been coined as The Brussels Effect.

Enforcement of these acts has cost Meta hundreds of millions of euros for breaches of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple has lost their monopoly of the App Store on their devices and Microsoft has been forced to unbundle a great deal of their services to allow competition. Any objective analysis would conclude that this has been a good thing for consumers.

During the creation of these acts, most recently the AI Act, tech giants which have substantial footprints in the EU, negotiated with lawmakers to try and find a middle ground that would balance continued innovation whilst protecting individual rights and freedoms.

Even so and despite this, companies like X and Meta have so detested this new regulatory landscape that they are now looking to far-right political groups in the EU and U.S. in an attempt to push policy in the other direction. Mark Zuckerberg is directly pushing the new administration to stop the EU from fining U.S. Companies and Elon Musk’s campaigning for Donald Trump, his support for the Reform Party in the UK, and his backing of figures like Tommy Robinson and parties such as the AfD in Germany underline attempts to align with nationalist agendas. These efforts are reportedly aimed at fostering a political climate resistant to perceived EU regulatory overreach. For instance, Musk’s remarks in support of the AfD highlight his preference for decentralising EU authority, while his support for Reform Party campaigns ties into broader opposition to EU innovation and technology laws, many of which remain part of the UK’s Retained EU Law following Brexit. This alignment appears to seek either significant revisions of EU frameworks or, in extreme cases, movements toward EU withdrawal where feasible.

At the same time, China’s Bytedance TikTok service is positioned to be shut down in the US on the 19th of January as a result of a recently passed law, signed by Joe Biden. This has been enacted on the basis of national security, citing concerns over user data being passed to Chinese authorities. However, many critics argue that the move is equally motivated by the platform’s growing threat to the market share of Instagram and YouTube, owned by Meta and Alphabet respectively. 

Hypocritically, while the U.S. government justifies banning TikTok under the guise of protecting citizen data, it continues to allow unfettered access for U.S. companies to harvest and process EU citizens’ data. This double standard becomes even more glaring when considering how the EU’s GDPR strictly regulates the flow of its citizens’ data, while the U.S. lacks comparable federal legislation for its own population. This is, of course, by design as the U.S. continues to value a perceived innovation at the expense of privacy.

To deepen the irony, Meta’s lobbying efforts in the EU include resistance to stricter privacy rules under the Digital Services Act, yet these same companies rally behind national security arguments in the U.S. to curb competition. Such selective enforcement reveals a pattern of technological protectionism masquerading as ethical governance. This inconsistency undermines the credibility of U.S. tech policy on the global stage, calling into question its motives and long-term objectives.

This new alignment between tech companies, specifically Meta and X, and the far right has now extended to the workplace at Meta, where progressive policies of inclusiveness are being withdrawn and DEI practices removed. For consumers of Meta’s services, in an abhorrent move, LGBTQ+ themes have been removed and it is now permissible to call members of those groups of people “mentally ill”.  The consequences of these moves will be seen moving forward but it is likely that between the new content moderation system and these new changes, there may be a steady outstream of users, but like Twitter, may continue to remain a platform for those who either agree or are agnostic towards the changes.  It remains to be seen whether this partnership of convenience with right-wing parties will be durable enough to overcome the ideological divides between the globalist ambitions of tech leaders and the nationalist priorities of far-right movements.

We have entered a new era of technological protectionism whose consequences may result in direct harm towards other areas of the transatlantic partnership. It would not be surprising to see efforts align against EU oversight which could influence policies into other areas of trade, which could (speculatively) manifest into tariffs or other limitations.

To defend against this, the EU and it’s member states need to coalesce around it’s passed regulations and reaffirm it’s citizens’ rights to privacy and freedom.

Or, just delete Facebook. And use Disconnect to remove all trace of it’s cookies from your browsing history.

On Facebook

social media

CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has decided that moderation of comments on his platforms has become too biased and is shifting to a model of Community Notes, aka the model used on X. (formerly Twitter)

ABC: After Trump’s election win, Meta is firing fact checkers and making big changes

As mentioned in my first, previous and somewhat timely post, this is not Meta’s first foray into misconduct on their social media platforms. One such event revolved around Cambridge Analytica which in 2018 was revealed to be illegally gathering personal information of users of Meta’s social networks for the purposes of aiding political campaigns, like the Trump 2016 Presidential Campaign.

Upon discovery, Meta took some surface-level actions to try and mitigate the damage caused to it’s corporate reputation: Highlighting privacy to users and making their settings more obvious, rolling out GDPR compliance across it’s platform worldwide, not just in the European Union, and it also increased staffing levels and standards in it’s moderation and community standards.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, now that enough time has passed and with more friends on the way in government circles, Zuckerberg has decided that it’s time to revert some of these policies back to the same behaviour from the past by removing fact-checkers and moving content moderation staff from the high minimum-wage-paying state of California to Texas, where staff who suffer from PTSD after looking at some content will perhaps be paid a princely minimum wage of $7.50 per hour. The reasoning for this is being pushed as that the existing moderators are too liberal in blue-state California and the reinforcement of freedom of speech.

This shift is especially troubling given reports of suppressed comments about Palestine since 2023, raising concerns about whose voices will be amplified and whose will be silenced under the new model.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for freedom of speech, but not at the expense of common courtesy and certainly not at the expense of facts.

The simple fact is that Facebook and it’s associated social media networks have been largely changed from, originally, a place where opinions are swapped and shared to a place where opinions are measured, shaped and governed.

This occurs because we allow it to. Every post or comment that we add to Meta’s servers provides more content to be analysed, parsed and dissected so that you are shown news, posts and advertisements which are tailored for you and your experience. After all, you don’t have to think about things that you already know or agree with.

Of course, this is not new information – we already know this.

And yet, there are still three billion people on Meta’s platforms.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink our participation in platforms that shape our discourse for profit.

Nostalgia + Reflection

meta

You probably have an era which you would consider “the good days of the Internet”. For me, that was the early-to-mid 1990s, where we enjoyed “easy” access to a new medium where information, which hitherto could only be transferred by post, fax, or voice from one person to another, was able to travel between multiple people in an instant. Certainly as much information as a 14.4k dial-up modem would allow.

Things like the World Wide Web were new and acronyms like “IRC” and “Usenet” were somewhat commonplace amongst the nerdy crowd. Little thought was paid to the idea of information ownership. We spoke freely on servers paid for by those who could afford it. Sometimes this was one individual; sometimes it was more collective. But it was infrastructure generally run and maintained out of altruism so that we could all enjoy one another’s company and the sensation of using technology that felt anonymous, futuristic, while staying somehow personal and authentic. It felt genuinely subversive in a sense, and gratifyingly so.

Much of today’s technologies stemmed from the open and free collaboration that was borne from this generation, not to mention relationships and life-long friendships.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the world has changed — and certainly not for the better. Discussion forums and blogging have mostly given way to social media, which has been corrupted and monitored for the slightest bit of personal information. This shift has led to a new age where personal data has become a commodity, privacy an afterthought, and authenticity drowned out by algorithms that thrive on polarisation.

It worries me that scandals like Cambridge Analytica have been mostly forgotten, swept under the rug of convenience. Society’s collective privacy has been steadily eroded. We’ve traded agency for ease, individuality for metrics. The rise of bots powered by large language models let loose into the public domain adds another layer of concern. Left unchecked, these tools risk transforming the very essence of online communication into something impersonal, curated, and devoid of nuance.

This blog is my own small step toward reclaiming some of the freedom and authenticity I value deeply. I’m still undecided about whether to allow commenting — an aspect of the Internet I value but rapidly losing it’s authenticity as AI becomes more human-like — but even without it, this space represents my deliberate return to simpler, more intentional digital engagement.

In returning to this format, I’m hoping to recapture the original spirit of the Internet — at least for myself. A spot where I can write and embrace a more intentional way of engagement, even if it’s just one-way for the moment.