In a recent tweet, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin slammed the underlying rhetoric. digital services law The European Union’s (DSA) is a regulation that imposes strict obligations on large digital platforms to restrict harmful content such as hate speech, cyberbullying, fraud, and dangerous products.
From its official @DigitalEU account, the European Commission promoted the spirit of the law with the following emphatic slogan:
There is no room for cyberbullying. There is no room for dangerous products. There is no place for hate speech. There is no room for fraud. Yeah. Under the Digital Services Act, what is illegal offline remains illegal online.
This message is trying to convey the following Anything that is illegal outside the internet cannot exist in the digital environment. The institutional intent is clear. It emphasizes the active responsibility of platforms to combat online harm.
However, Vitalik Buterin says that this approach can lead to authoritarian impulses Under the pretext of protecting users, it unfairly limits the diversity of ideas online. The programmers said in their response that the idea that certain expressions had “no place” reflected “totalitarian and anti-parliamentary impulses.”
According to your reading:
The idea that there shouldn’t be “room” for things we don’t like is a fundamentally totalitarian and anti-parliamentary impulse. It’s not compatible with putting yourself in an environment that you don’t have complete control over.
Buterin Vitalik, founder of Ethereum.
The debate focuses on pluralism and freedom of expression, arguing that it is possible to completely remove content that is considered bad or dangerous, especially when its definition is subjective. It opens the door to centralized control and censorship mechanisms.
Buterin clarified that this is not about defending digital disruption, but about accepting that in a free society there will always be opinions and content that people find harmful. The problem, he argues, is not that these corners exist, but that this content is greatly amplified by algorithms designed to maximize it. engagementwhich marked networks like X (formerly Twitter).
At the moment, the Digital Services Act precisely proposes to reduce this impact by requiring large platforms to offer options to their users. feed As part of a digital rights approach, it is not based on algorithmic recommendations (i.e. not personalized).
Buterin warns: We adopt this philosophy.no space‘ could lead Europe down a ‘dark’ pathThere, regulation, however well-intentioned, becomes a tool to impose a single vision of truth on the digital public space. For him, true protection is not about suppressing controversial ideas, but about designing platforms and policies that minimize the dominance of harmful content without sacrificing pluralism.
This debate over the balance between online safety and freedom of expression has placed the DSA at the center of global regulatory tensions. How can we protect our users without falling prey to control mechanisms that limit diversity of opinion? Mr. Buterin’s critique urges us to reconsider the application of laws like the DSA, based on principles that are consistent with the fundamental values of a free and open internet.