Analysis-Europe squares up to Big Tech, risking ire of Washington

Europe's Response to Big Tech

By David Latona, Michel Rose and Renee Maltezou

National Actions and Investigations

MADRID, Feb 17 (Reuters) - European nations are ratcheting up the pressure on social media companies, responding to a public outcry over child safety fears but risking a backlash from the United States, home to the likes of Facebook and Elon Musk's X.

Geopolitical Implications

Spain on Tuesday ordered prosecutors to investigate Facebook owner Meta, X and TikTok for allegedly spreading AI-generated child sexual images, after a similar move in Britain.

Future of Digital Regulation

Ireland also opened a formal probe of X's AI chatbot Grok over its processing of personal data and the production of harmful sexualized images.

A growing list of European countries - France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Slovenia and the Czech Republic - has in recent weeks moved to follow Australia in proposing a social media ban for adolescents, amid rising concern about addiction, online abuse and falling school performance.

Germany and Britain are weighing similar steps.

The national actions reflect political urgency but also frustration with the European Union. Politicians, advisers and analysts say governments are acting alone because they doubt Brussels will move quickly or forcefully enough - even though individual states face the same legal, diplomatic and enforcement hurdles as the EU.

GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS

Under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which took effect in 2024, major platforms face fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover if they fail to curb illegal or harmful content.

But enforcing penalties is politically fraught. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs and sanctions if EU countries impose new tech taxes or enforce the DSA in ways that hit U.S. firms.

The European Commission dismisses suggestions that it is soft on U.S. Big Tech, pointing out in an online statement on Tuesday that it has opened several investigations including against X and its deployment of Grok.

"Through measures like the DSA, the EU is shaping Europe's digital future. It is supporting, funding and regulating new technologies with a goal to strengthen democracy," it said.

The rhetoric has at times boiled over.

French President Emmanuel Macron last year called U.S. resistance to European regulation a "geopolitical battle".

Trump's administration warned in December that Europe faced "civilizational erasure" and urged the U.S. to foster "resistance to Europe's current trajectory".

Spain's Consumer Rights Minister Pablo Bustinduy told Le Grand Continent newspaper on Tuesday that his country's crackdown aimed to "break free from digital dependence on the United States", adding that some platforms were being used to "destabilise European democracies from within".

INDEPENDENT ACTION

A modification of the DSA's guidelines on July 14 allowing national age restriction laws prompted Denmark to move independently, its digitalisation ministry told Reuters.

Spain had been weighing action for months, but the final trigger for proposing a ban for under-16s - and a law making social media CEOs accountable for hate speech - was Grok’s generation of non-consensual sexual images of minors, Youth and Children Minister Sira Rego said.

For Macron, who has blamed social media for fuelling violence among young people, the turning point was the fatal stabbing of a school aide by a 14-year-old student in June. He said he would push for an EU-wide ban on adolescent use or, if necessary, act unilaterally in France.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" - which argues that smartphones and social media are "rewiring" children’s brains - was "an eye‑opening experience".

"We are running the biggest unchecked experiment with our children’s brains ever," he said.

(Reporting by David Latona, Michel Rose, Renee Maltezou, Soren Jeppesen, Supantha Mukerjee, Victoria Waldersee, Inti Landauro and Elizabeth Pineau. Writing by Charlie Devereux. Editing by Matt Scuffham and Mark Potter)