In 2024, during the fiercely fought US presidential election campaign, current US Vice President JD Vance made an extraordinary ultimatum: if Europe wanted the United States to remain committed to NATO, it should stop regulating Elon Musk’s X.

Vance wasn’t just objecting to regulation; he was recasting it as a threat to democracy itself. But in reality, regulation is what defends democracy.

‘American power comes with certain strings attached,’ Vance warned in September. ‘One of those is respect free speech—especially in our European allies.’

Vance made the comments during a podcast interview in reaction to a letter sent to Elon Musk and publicly shared in August by the then EU commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton.

Vance, who has previously acknowledged crafting statements for media impact rather than accuracy, mischaracterised the letter. Breton hadn’t called for Musk’s arrest, as Vance claimed on the podcast, nor had he objected to Trump appearing on the platform.

But Breton’s missive was, nonetheless, both provocative and profoundly unhelpful. It invoked X’s obligations under the European Union’s landmark new content law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), in the context of a planned livestream between Musk and Donald Trump—an episode that risked being read as an effort to tilt the scales of the US election.

Brussels moved quickly to contain the fallout. Within days of Breton’s letter becoming public, European Commission officials scrambled to clarify that the warning had not been coordinated, endorsed or even seen in advance by President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen or her colleagues.

The incident was part of an ongoing feud between Breton and von der Leyen that ultimately ended with Breton’s resignation from his role and the withdrawal of his nomination for a second term in the commission.

Breton’s departure effectively took the heat off Musk. The commission was about to wrap up its probe into X and issue a substantial fine, but momentum stalled after Breton left.

After Trump’s victory and Musk’s ascendance into a role in the administration, the smart money in Brussels bet that the commission would slow-walk DSA enforcement against X and focus on an easier target, Chinese-owned TikTok.

But, in an infamously blunt speech in Munich in February, Vance hinted that even that could be a step too far. Romania had just annulled a national election over a TikTok-led influence operation which was linked to Russia and which Vance dismissed as overblown.

The election was cancelled on ‘flimsy suspicions’, Vance said, mocking the idea that a democracy could be compromised by what he called ‘a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country’. If that were enough to destroy an election, he argued, then perhaps it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Ironically, Vance goes further in defending TikTok than even Xi Jinping, who, when pressed by the wife of Brazil’s president  in May over the app’s harms to women and children, told the Brazilian president that Brazil had every right to regulate it.

Last week, the commission made a preliminary finding under the DSA over TikTok’s failure to maintain a transparent advertisement library. These libraries—designed to show who paid for what, who was targeted and what was shown—are essential for spotting scams, covert influence operations and electoral disinformation.

It is precisely the kind of mechanism that could have prevented Romania from having to annul its election, after networks of fake and dormant accounts were used to artificially amplify a far-right, pro-Trump and pro-Kremlin candidate.

The DSA reflects hard-earned European wisdom. It comes from historical memory of democracies undone by propaganda, foreign interference and the normalisation of lies. Vance and Musk frame their agenda as ‘free speech’, but in Europe, it increasingly looks like a coordinated push to weaken democratic institutions and empower their far-right allies.

The EU’s commissioner for technological sovereignty, security and democracy, Henna Virkkunen, has taken a different tack, rejecting Breton’s theatrics in favour of quiet precision. ‘Of course, many things we can always negotiate and discuss’, she said in February. ‘But we can’t negotiate about our values’.

Those values are embedded in the DSA’s most basic expectations. Platforms such as X must be transparent about who is paying for ads, their verification systems must not mislead users, and researchers must be granted access to essential data. These are not radical demands. They are basic measures to safeguard democratic discourse.

According to Virkkunen, the commission has expanded its probe into X, which helps explain the delay. But the DSA’s credibility may be damaged if enforcement continues to stall.

The lesson for Australia is clear. We cannot afford to adopt Vance’s complacent logic. Regulation does not weaken democracy; it defends it. If we shy away from regulation, we risk opening the door not just to interference from hostile states, but to ideological actors in the US who have already shown they are more than willing to meddle.