Regulating platform power now seen as hostile act

US sanctions, democratic sovereignty, and the necessity of standing together

Something significant shifted in late December 2025. The United States government imposed visa sanctions on five individuals associated with enforcing European platform regulation, including Thierry Breton, former EU Commissioner and architect of the Digital Services Act. The US State Department also sanctioned civil society leaders from Germany and the United Kingdom working on online hate speech and disinformation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex” engaging in “extraterritorial censorship”—a move condemned by European leaders.

The sanctions came weeks after the European Commission’s €120 million fine against Elon Musk’s X for violating the Digital Services Act through consumer deception via its verification system, lack of advertising transparency, and denial of researcher access to data. The Commission and independent experts have explained that the fine had nothing whatsoever to do with speech or censorship. The US government chose to ignore this.

Work that has long sat within the scope of democratic governance, including enforcing transparency requirements, holding platforms accountable to national law, and protecting users from demonstrable harm, is now treated as something else entirely. It has been reframed as geopolitical aggression, as a hostile act against the United States itself. But in reality it is part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on the media and freedom of expression.

A report published in December 2025 by Nora Benavidez for the Free Press, set out in detail the Trump administration’s “hostile relationship with dissent and free expression in 2025”. The report also noted the significant shift:

While the U.S. government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association — be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress — the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive and escalating.

That domestic pattern has now been exported. Enforcement action against a US platform owner with close ties to the administration triggers political retaliation that recasts lawful regulation as ideological persecution. Regulatory oversight is framed as foreign interference in US affairs. Those enforcing it are designated as threats to American interests.

The charge—now US government policy—is that anyone challenging platform power, algorithmic opacity, or extractive business models is an enemy of free expression and democracy itself.

The accusation inverts reality so totally that ‘the Upside Down’ in Stranger Things feels straightforward by comparison. Those enforcing accountability are cast as censors. Those defending democratic governance are framed as threats to democracy.

For years, tech libertarians and right-wing operators have weaponised freedom of expression as a shield against accountability. What they defend is not freedom of expression as a democratic right, but freedom from consequence for conduct and business models aligned with their ideological and financial interests. Expression is defended only when it reinforces power. Regulation becomes "censorship" the moment it threatens profit, political influence, or platform dominance.

This should concern anyone serious about sovereignty, regulatory autonomy, democratic governance and resistance in the digital sphere. It means that the work of building and sustaining alliances is no longer a strategic preference. It is a necessity.

At the fome Symposium (in Bonn, December 2025), I examined how coalitions and alliances can create agency, shape narratives, and open spaces that did not exist before, even when facing severe asymmetries. Coalitions and alliances do not guarantee influence, but under conditions of authoritarian flexing, this capacity to create collective agency becomes essential. It exposes the fiction that platform accountability is a fringe concern driven by censors, rather than a mainstream democratic project spanning continents and political traditions. When alliances succeed, they make it harder to intimidate individuals quietly. That is precisely why intimidation has now gone global.

Most of our work in 2025 has been rooted in African-led initiatives, involving coalition-building across three contexts, each with their own strengths and constraints: the South African National Editors Forum-led alliance’s participation in the Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, the M20 Summit and Johannesburg Declaration, and the CTRL+J tricontinental conference series and alliance now linking South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia. Each operates at a different scale : national regulatory influence, multilateral agenda-setting, and South-South strategic collaboration. Each now operates in an environment where coordination on platform regulation is seen as “extraterritorial censorship”. It is a charge that is both ludicrous and dangerous.

What this moment demands is not performative solidarity but practical coordination.

Coalitions should evolve into structures capable of sustained action. That requires research infrastructure, policy tools, institutional capacity, and trust built over time. It also requires recognising that those involved in this work (regulators, researchers, civil society actors, journalists) now face reputational and professional risks that were not present a few years ago.

Standing together under these conditions means rejecting the false binary between freedom of expression and accountability. It means insisting that democratic governance is not censorship, that sovereign regulation is not foreign interference with the US, and that holding powerful actors to account is not ideological persecution.

Coalitions that combine credible research, narrative power, and sustained coordination offer the strongest counter to strategies designed to isolate and intimidate. They also distribute risk and create collective capacity that individual actors cannot sustain alone. And they build the political, legal and intellectual infrastructure needed to create and defend democratic digital governance over the long term.

That requires ensuring that regulators facing retaliation are not isolated, supporting researchers whose work is misrepresented as censorship, and building structures that can withstand coordinated attacks on the legitimacy of platform accountability.

When accountability is framed as hostility, the real threat is not to platforms, but to democracy itself.