21 January 2025
ECR Group Co-President Nicola Procaccini delivered a strong rebuke to centre-left calls for greater intervention in online platforms, warning that the Digital Services Act (DSA) must not be transformed into a tool of political censorship.
Speaking in the European Parliament, he described demands for stricter enforcement of the DSA as an excessive reaction to the left’s declining dominance over political discourse on social media and the waning influence of mainstream progressives
“When the left dominated social media, deciding who could speak and what could be said, they saw no need for debates like this. Now, as their grip slips, they suddenly demand action. The Digital Services Act must be a tool for freedom, not for imposing ideological bias”, Mr Procaccini stated.
Mr Procaccini’s reads in full:
Thank you, President, and Vice-President Virkkunen, for your presence. Frankly, this debate comes at a rather suspicious moment. The fact that it was primarily driven by the left, and the remarks we have just heard from the socialist colleague, only reinforce that suspicion. My suspicion is that the left, at every level, is struggling to cope with the loss of its political dominance over social media platforms.
When you exercised suffocating control over political debate through social networks—dictating who could speak and what could be said—you did not feel the need for a debate like this.
By contrast, we European conservatives did. And we saw the need for a tool like the DSA. To protect children from the dangers of the internet, first and foremost. To defend freedom of speech, which was being outrageously suppressed. That is why the vast majority of us voted in favour. Because we found it incredible that Twitter could shut down the account of a democratically elected president, Donald Trump, while allowing Ayatollah Khamenei to threaten the world with impunity through his tweets. We wanted to ensure that users, if unjustly deprived of their freedom of expression, had the right to appeal to a real judge—not to a “fact-checker.”
Unlike you, we do not claim to possess the truth; we are simply passionate seekers of it. And we know that truth can only be found through open debate between differing opinions—something that must always be safeguarded, both online and in the real world.
The DSA is a tool, and like any tool, it must be used correctly: without bias, without abuse, and without enforcing a singular ideology. The truth is that for nearly two hundred years—since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville—the story has always been the same: we stand on the side of freedom, while you stand on the other.