Transatlantic geopolitical battles came to a head this past week, as the European Commission finally fined X €120 million under the Digital Services Act. Musk’s response: to demand the EU be abolished (a stance backed by ex-Russian President Medvedev, also on X). At least Radek Sikorski had a decent response...
Back in 2003-04 I was a Masters student in the politics department at the College of Europe. Respect for procedure and for the Rule of Law, and the European Union as a community of law, were common themes throughout the year. And those are principles I have done my best...
Once a year I am invited to run a workshop at the University of Maastricht about online communication in European Union politics. This time, as always, the students were bright, motivated and funny and it’s interesting working with them. But one student – in a group exercise investigating the ethics...
From a friend a few days ago on Signal: “Empfehlenswerter F.A.Z. Beitrag: Wie die Bundespolizei Züge an der Grenze kontrolliert” (“Recommended F.A.Z. article: How the federal police check trains at the border“) I open it. And it is terrible. Sure, the images might be nice, but this is not journalism....
Once in a while there is a bout of introspection on Bluesky that the network will never take off roughly because text based social networks are somehow passé. See this from this morning for example. The same critique is levelled at Mastodon – that the struggles of that network to...
A post this morning caught my eye – German tech commentator Sascha Pallenberg had content about the cancellation of the Jimmy Kimmel show banned on LinkedIn. I tried to see if I could replicate the ban (here and here) but my content went through. I don’t doubt the veracity of...
Von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech today was full of references to tech sovereignty. You probably read on X, WhatsApp or Substack. Or maybe on Facebook, Instagram, or perhaps even watched on TikTok. You might even have read about it in Table.media’s new WhatsApp channel, or CEPS’s Thinking...
A couple of weeks ago, an old friend in Brussels I know from EU politics messaged me on Signal asking me how I was. “I can’t reply fully now” I told him, “I am in rural Romania on #CrossBorderRail.” “Oh are you doing another tour?” he replied. Well, yes, just...
I’m writing on that fateful day, 20th January 2025. I stopped using Twitter more than two years ago, judging then it would only get worse under Musk – and I was sadly proven right. Today I am ending all association with Meta tools, due to Zuckerberg cosying up with Trump....
One of the interesting aspects of all the “officialising” the Ursula von der Leyen Bluesky account stuff is how it has created a discussion about verification of identity on social networks and – although seldom expressed as such – posed the question of what the social network itself (or the...
Back in October 2023, when Bluesky was a fledgling invite-only network, I set up the account @vonderleyen.bsky.social for a few reasons (and I wrote about the experiment then). First, it seemed like a reasonable bet that Bluesky would grow into viable Twitter alternative for EU politics. Second, it was better...
Just over a year ago I wrote this post, drawing on lyrics from The Who and the Rolling Stones to explain my lingering scepticism about Bluesky. After being fooled by Elon Musk, should we trust Bluesky? I wasn’t fully convinced then, was more convinced in the past 12 months, and...
