French President Emmanuel Macron used language rarely heard from a sitting head of state in formal diplomatic contexts on Tuesday, calling tech companies' invocation of free speech as a defence against European digital regulation "bullshit" — a term that, in its deliberateness, was clearly chosen to register exactly the contempt it conveys.
"The argument that regulating online content is censorship — that's bullshit," Macron said, according to Bloomberg. The statement came as European institutions and Silicon Valley platforms have been locked in an escalating confrontation over the enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA) — the EU's most ambitious attempt to impose accountability standards on social media companies for the content they host and amplify.
The news value here is not merely the word itself, but the context in which a head of state chose to deploy it. Macron is a trained lawyer and former investment banker who chooses his public language with precision. His use of profanity in a formal policy context is a signal that France, and the EU institutions it is attempting to mobilise, regard Silicon Valley's current posture — aligned increasingly with the Trump administration's anti-regulatory stance — as a challenge that demands a visceral political response rather than a technocratic one.
The DSA came into force in 2023 and requires very large online platforms — defined as those with more than 45 million users in the European Union — to remove illegal content, provide transparency about their recommendation algorithms, and accept independent audits of their systems. Companies including Meta, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Google have all been subject to DSA investigations. The European Commission has been the primary enforcement body.
The confrontation has sharpened significantly since the return of the Trump administration to Washington. Senior American tech executives, including X owner Elon Musk, have aligned publicly and explicitly with the administration's posture that European digital regulation constitutes an attack on free expression — a framing that the EU rejects categorically. The administration has signalled that it regards DSA enforcement against American companies as a potential trade irritant, a position that European officials view as direct political interference in a sovereign regulatory process.
Macron's statement was not an isolated outburst. It reflects a French and broadly European calculation that the politics of digital sovereignty have shifted: that the EU cannot enforce the DSA on a technocratic basis alone if the companies subject to it have the political backing of the American administration and are willing to frame any enforcement as ideologically motivated censorship. The response, Paris appears to have concluded, must be political and at the level of public discourse — not merely legal and regulatory.
The DSA enforcement process is now inseparable from the broader transatlantic confrontation visible in the Ukraine talks, the NATO cohesion debates, and the trade relationship. European officials who once maintained a careful distinction between digital regulation as a technical matter and geopolitics as a separate domain are finding that distinction increasingly difficult to sustain when the other side has collapsed it.
For Europe's digital sovereignty project — a decade-long effort to ensure that the continent's information infrastructure is not entirely subject to the policy choices of American corporations or the political priorities of American administrations — Tuesday's confrontation is both a test and a threshold.
