platform regulation – The Fearless Scholar

Free Elections and “Turning Down the Noise” on Online Platforms

Michael John-Hopkins, 17 July 2026 11 mins read

In July 2025 in Bradshaw and Others v United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights confronted the unexpected tension between freedom of expression and free elections. Democratic societies must preserve the broad freedom of political expression on which open electoral debate depends, but that freedom may also be exploited through coordinated foreign influence operations designed to undermine free elections.

The applicants argued that the United Kingdom had failed to adequately investigate, and protect against, Russian interference in its democratic processes. The Court did not find a violation. It emphasised the difficulty of measuring the effects of disinformation and influence campaigns and allowed the United Kingdom a wide margin of appreciation, particularly because no clear European consensus has yet emerged on the specific protective measures States must adopt. The judgment was nevertheless significant. It accepted that Article 3 of Protocol No 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to free elections) may impose positive obligations where hostile-State interference creates a real risk of impairing the very essence of the right to free elections.

Before the judgment, the UK Parliament Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report (2020) had already described the United Kingdom as a target for Russian disinformation and political influence operations. Importantly, it distinguished disinformation from the broader playbook of malign interference, which may combine manipulated narratives with illicit funding, cyber operations, interference with electoral machinery, covert amplification and “hack-and-leak” activity. Such operations frequently seek less to secure agreement with a single message than to intensify division, confuse attribution, discredit reliable sources and erode trust in democratic institutions.

In Bradshaw, the Court accepted that there was evidence of interference in the United Kingdom’s democratic processes of sufficient intensity to be capable of impairing the very essence of the right to benefit from free elections. Its conclusion was not that the threat was unreal, but that the United Kingdom’s response remained within its wide margin of appreciation.

That tension captures one of the central problems now facing democratic legal systems. Electoral rights can no longer solely be guaranteed at the ballot box but must also be protected in the communicative environment in which electoral preferences are formed. That environment is increasingly structured by platforms, recommender systems, political advertising, synthetic media, data profiling, covert funding and the speed with which false or manipulated material can outrun scrutiny and correction.

The legal challenge is therefore not simply to ensure that voters can physically cast a ballot. It is to protect an information environment that remains sufficiently open, plural, intelligible and contestable to ensure deliberative democracy – without converting the protection of elections into a general power to police political truth.

“Turning down the noise” in the digital environment

This is where the new radical idea of “turning down the noise” or “protection from noise” is useful. The phrase should be handled carefully. It does not describe a right to truth, silence, comfort or protection from disagreement or offence. Democratic politics is “noisy” by design. It includes exaggeration, error, satire, anger, mobilisation and sharp contestation.

The concern is narrower, namely organised, synthetic and amplified noise. That means engineered saturation, impersonation, microtargeting, synthetic deception, covert amplification, harassment or suppression of correction in ways that materially impair the practical ability to receive, test and contest political information autonomously.

In his separate concurring opinion in Bradshaw, Judge Jakab gives this idea one of its first significant judicial formulations within the Strasbourg system. He suggests that digital disinformation can reach a point where the “noise” level is so high that the right to receive information under Article 10 may itself be impaired. His concurring opinion fuses and balances human rights, platform governance, and national security considerations, at both high and granular levels of analysis.

One of the strengths of liberal democracies when compared to autocracies is that liberal democracies’ political decisions and democratic accountability mechanisms (such as elections) tend to be relatively more strongly influenced by fact-based discourses weighing arguments. If we allow the digital disinformation noise levels to ravage as high as they currently are in our public debates, then we are endangering liberal democracies’ structural superiority.

This may become an important line of jurisprudential development because it sits precisely where law, politics and technology now meet. There is also a historical reversal here. The post-1989 European human-rights order was significantly concerned with supporting transitions towards democracy and the rule of law. It must now consider how established democracies should be protected when revanchist authoritarian states and resurgent anti-democratic movements exploit democratic openness, sometimes in mutually reinforcing ways, to destabilise political institutions and corrode public trust from within. It must also confront the reflexive danger that the language of democratic protection may itself be exploited. Real, exaggerated, fabricated or unverified claims of malign interference may be weaponised to delegitimise elections, discredit political opponents and independent institutions, justify coercive or exclusionary measures, and consolidate power.

Giving citizens more control over the noise

The point is not that Strasbourg should prescribe a single model of platform regulation. Bradshaw itself points the other way in that in an area of technical complexity, national-security sensitivity and limited European consensus, States retain a wide margin of appreciation. But subsidiarity does not mean that human-rights law has nothing to say. As Robert Spano has argued in a different context, the contemporary Convention system increasingly works through process-based supervisory review whereby national authorities are given space where they act in good faith, reason carefully and balance competing interests, but law still helps sustain the democratic character of political decision-making. The question for future cases is whether emerging regulatory practices concerning provenance, amplification, synthetic content, political advertising and platform risk assessment will give courts firmer ground on which to assess the informational conditions of democratic choice, particularly where those conditions are deliberately manipulated to undermine the orientation towards “effective political democracy” identified in the Preamble to the European Convention of Human Rights.

In practical terms, protection from noise would not mean that States or platforms decide political truth for citizens. It would mean giving citizens more meaningful control over the conditions in which political information reaches them. Users should be able to know whether they are dealing with a real person, a pseudonymous account, a bot, a political advertiser, an influencer, a campaign organisation or a verified media source. They should be able to reduce the volume of automated, recommended or paid-for material; choose non-personalised or following-only feeds; see when political content is synthetic or AI-generated; and understand why they are being targeted. The aim is not to remove disagreement from democratic life, but to make the architecture of online political communication more transparent, adjustable and contestable.

2025 Romanian presidential election – noise control or authoritarian regression?

The Romanian election litigation shows the stakes. In Călin Georgescu v Romania, the Strasbourg Court rejected the application concerning the annulment of Romania’s 2024 presidential electoral process, principally because Article 3 of Protocol No 1 does not normally apply to presidential elections unless the office has sufficient legislative functions. That means Georgescu should not be treated as a Strasbourg merits ruling approving the annulment. Its importance is different. It records the kind of factual scenario now pressing against electoral law, namely algorithmic amplification, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, unlabelled electoral promotion, campaign-finance opacity and unequal campaign visibility.

The Romanian Constitutional Court’s Ruling No 32 of 6 December 2024 treated the electoral process as vitiated by non-transparent digital promotion, misuse of social-media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and undeclared campaign funding. Whether one sees that decision as necessary constitutional safeguarding or a dangerous authoritarian regression, it illustrates the outer edge of protection from noise. At some point, information-environment manipulation may be argued to affect not merely campaign fairness, but the free formation and expression of democratic choice.

That is why the Venice Commission’s urgent report on the cancellation of election results is so important. It recognises that online campaigning, disinformation, artificial intelligence and external influence create new electoral risks. But it also insists on constitutional discipline. Generally, annulment must be exceptional, it must rest on clear legal competence, fair procedure, adequate evidence, and a reasoned assessment that irregularities may have affected the result. In other words, democratic systems must be able to recognise information-environment harm without making election cancellation too easy.

The emerging regulatory picture is therefore fragmented but significant. Bradshaw gives the human-rights law ‘seeding’ that electoral rights may require positive protection against hostile interference. The Romanian litigation gives the factual pressure point, namely platform amplification and digital opacity can put electoral legitimacy under severe strain. The Venice Commission supplies the rule-of-law brake in policy terms that serious remedies require legality, evidence, procedure and proportionality.

Retreat from platform self-governance in the EU and UK

Platform governance is the next part of the picture. The EU Digital Services Act moves beyond a purely passive view of platforms. It treats very large online platforms and search engines as potential sources of systemic risk, including risks to fundamental rights, civic discourse, public security and electoral processes. The Commission’s electoral-process guidelines under the DSA translate that idea into election-specific concerns including recommender systems, generative AI, political advertising, coordinated manipulation, crisis-response mechanisms and cooperation with electoral authorities.

The EU Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising adds another layer. Political advertising becomes democratically dangerous when voters cannot tell who paid for a message, why they are seeing it, which audience was targeted, or whether different voters are receiving incompatible versions of a campaign. Transparency does not solve manipulation, but it helps restore the public character of political contestation.

Privacy and data protection also matter. Profiling and political microtargeting can transform democratic communication into the behavioural sorting of citizens and the tailored manipulation of their choices. The issue is not merely privacy in the narrow sense. It is whether voters are placed into opaque political environments selected according to inferred fear, resentment, identity or susceptibility. In that respect, the GDPR is also part of the democratic-resilience architecture of mitigating manipulation and coercion.

The EU AI Act is especially relevant because it recognises that harm may arise from system design, not only unlawful content. Its rules on manipulative or deceptive techniques, vulnerability exploitation, synthetic-content transparency and AI systems used to influence elections or voting behaviour do not create a general law of malign influence. But they identify risk indicators that map closely onto protection from noise, namely opacity, synthetic realism, behavioural steering, vulnerability targeting and loss of provenance.

In contrast, the UK relies on a dispersed framework comprising the Online Safety Act 2023, data-protection law, electoral law, including campaign-source transparency requirements under the Elections Act 2022, and the National Security Act 2023. The latter criminalises certain coercive, deceptive or otherwise unlawful foreign interference with political processes, public functions and UK interests, while the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme requires greater transparency concerning political influence conducted at the direction of foreign powers.

European regulatory leadership of noise control in the digital sphere

This is where a limited ‘Brussels effect’ may matter. The point is not that the EU model will become global law, nor that it is beyond criticism. But large platforms, AI providers and advertising intermediaries may find it easier to build systems around demanding expectations of transparency, provenance, audit, risk assessment and researcher access. If so, EU regulation may indirectly raise the baseline for democratic information governance elsewhere, including within the broader European legal space. That hope depends on enforcement, judicial oversight, platform incentives and whether other jurisdictions view systemic-risk regulation as democratic infrastructure rather than censorship.

The importance of Bradshaw is therefore not that Strasbourg has created a settled right to protection from disinformation. The Court recognised the possible relevance of positive obligations but, rather than prescribing particular safeguards or applying strict review, left States considerable discretion within a wide margin of appreciation. That caution reflects the absence of a clear European consensus on the measures required to protect elections from hostile information operations. It also makes it more important to identify where regulatory convergence, and potentially such a consensus, is beginning to emerge. Across human-rights law, electoral law, platform regulation, data protection, AI governance and Venice Commission standards, recurring principles include provenance, transparency, recommender accountability, limits on microtargeting, synthetic-media labelling, campaign-finance visibility, platform-data access, fair procedure and evidence-based remedies.

None of this means that technology can solve social, political, economic and diplomatic problems. Democracies cannot outsource electoral integrity to labels, dashboards, audits or content-moderation tools. But the opposite error is equally dangerous, namely leaving platforms, AI systems and advertising infrastructures without legal guidance, free to operate in a manufactured aterritorial space, immune from accountability for the destabilizing effects occurring through their digital architectures while expecting voters, journalists, candidates and electoral bodies to absorb the forced choices and consequences.

An emerging consensus on noise control?

The emerging consensus, if there is one, is not a consensus on truth control. Nor is it yet a fully settled Convention-law consensus on exactly what every State must do. There remains regulatory divergence, and much will depend on domestic implementation, enforcement capacity and institutional design. But the legal and policy conditions for convergence are now visible. Across platform regulation, electoral law, data protection, AI governance, political-advertising transparency and Venice Commission standards, recurring concerns can be identified, namely provenance, transparency, recommender accountability, microtargeting limits, synthetic-media labelling, campaign-finance visibility, platform data access, fair procedure and evidence-based remedies.

Protection from noise is best understood in that restrained sense. It is not protection from disagreement, nor a licence for State truth control. It is protection of the practical conditions that allow disagreement to remain visible, intelligible, contestable and democratic. Citizens should be able to know who is speaking, who is paying, whether content is synthetic, why they are being targeted, how platforms amplify political material, and what remedies exist when those systems are abused. The deeper danger is not only that citizens may encounter false claims, but that digital architectures may increasingly shape attention, visibility and behaviour in ways that are difficult for citizens to perceive, contest or resist. In that respect, Shoshana Zuboff’s account of “instrumentarian power” is useful. Malign actors, foreign, domestic, may exploit these aterritorial architectures not by physically silencing or controlling citizens through totalitarian force, but by steering the conditions under which they see, feel, rank, trust and act in a way that is detrimental at individual and societal levels. It is to preserve enough autonomy, transparency and contestability for us to be more confident that what we take ourselves to think is genuinely our own.

Is a Social Media Ban for Under 16s a Panacea for Online Child Safety?

Stephanie Law, 3 July 2026 8 mins read

On Monday the 15th of June 2026, a week before announcing his resignation as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer confirmed that the Government would introduce legislation to implement a social media ban for children and young people in the UK.

The under-16s social media ban reflects a significant step in the UK’s attempts to regulate the online environment, and more specifically, to provide for “a safer digital childhood”. Indeed, for the supporters of a blanket age-based ban, the Labour Government’s commitment constitutes a necessary intervention to protect children’s safety and wellbeing, amongst growing public concern about social media use and the risks arising from children’s access to social media content that may exacerbate mental health concerns and existing vulnerabilities, expanded opportunities for engagement amounting to cyberbullying or exploitation, exposure to material relating to self-harm, suicide and eating disorders, as well as hate speech and misinformation.

While the background of the broader discussions on children’s online safety encompass many tragic incidents, it is necessary to consider whether young people’s exposure to risk in their increasingly intertwined offline and digital lives will effectively be reduced by an age-based ban. Until now, the UK has stopped short of introducing a blanket ban on young people accessing social media platforms. Instead, the Online Safety Act 2023 establishes obligations on platforms to remove illegal content, and content which is harmful to children.

The popularity of social media bans

The UK’s proposal follows a similar ban implemented in Australia at the end of 2025 while proposals have also been advanced in France, Portugal and Spain. At the EU level, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in November 2025 proposing that the EU adopt a minimum age requirement of 16 for access to social media and video sharing platforms, as well as AI companions. Young people between the ages of 13 and 16 would be able to access such platforms only with parental consent. This age-based ban is envisaged to operate alongside and strengthen the enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act (similar to the UK’s proposed ban).

The UK proposes to ban under 16s from accessing user-to-user social media platforms, that is to say, platforms that allow for social interactions between users and on which content can be posted; this would include platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat and TikTok. Moreover, the Government intends to implement a requirement that access to certain harmful features on platforms, such as livestreaming, stranger communication (including in gaming) and “romantic companion” chatbots, is restricted to over 18s.

The ban will not apply to direct messaging platforms, like WhatsApp. With these measures, the Government hopes to adopt a model for protecting children online, which goes beyond a simple blanket ban, and instead responds to both the risks children face and their broader experiences online. These risks, the Government argues, are exacerbated by the real-time accessibility of potentially harmful content and tech companies’ use of algorithmic recommender systems, which undermine the scope for effective content moderation.

The decision to introduce a ban follows a short consultation, undertaken between the months of March and May of 2026, in which the Government sought the views of the general public, including parents, guardians and young people, children’s charities and civil society organisations, as well as other stakeholders, including teachers, academics and industry partners. The consultation received over 115,000 responses, with the Government concluding that 9 out of 10 parents and two-thirds of children support restrictions on under-16s accessing certain social media platforms.

The timeframe set out by Keir Starmer and Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, reflects the Government’s prioritisation of the social media ban. Starmer indicated that the Government would “move at speed” to drive secondary legislation through Parliament using the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, with the intention of putting the ban into place in the Spring of 2027.

The Government has indicated that Ofcom will be responsible for establishing “accurate, robust, reliable and fair” age assurance mechanisms which protect privacy rights, with the aim of ensuring that children cannot work around these restrictions. Platforms will be responsible for implementing these mechanisms, meaning that the platforms and not children themselves will be penalised for non-compliance. Ofcom is designated as the independent regulatory body for online safety in the Online Safety Act 2023; it is competent to identify – through the adoption of guidance and codes of practice – the practices that online platforms should follow to ensure compliance with their obligations, monitor, investigate and assess compliance and take enforcement measures.

The problems with a blanket age-based ban and its alternatives

The decision to restrict under-16s access to social media platforms is by no means uncontroversial. While there is broad consensus across law and policy-makers, public health researchers and child protection advocates that children and young people face a number of risks from accessing specific types of content and from various forms of online engagement, the nature and severity of the risk of those harms is not homogenous. This necessarily gives rise to questions as to the appropriateness of a blanket age-based restriction, relative to alternative interventions that would still allow children and young people to benefit from the opportunities that digital technologies provide. These include – amongst others – access to educational resources (indeed, the UK Government has indicated education platforms are not targeted by the ban), the development of socialisation skills, social inclusion and integration into supportive communities, and exposure to diverse cultures and viewpoints.

The problematics of the ban are significant. There is a danger that the implementation of a blanket ban merely gives the appearance of a Government being proactive, creating a false sense of security as to being in control of a significant problem, in a way that may undermine scope for further regulatory intervention. Regulating a rapidly evolving and complex digital environment driven by a small number of powerful tech companies necessitates informed and critical discussions about the role of technology in society.

While the UK Government indicates that online platforms will be required to implement effective age assurance mechanisms, there is a possibility that parents, guardians and educators will bear the burden of “policing” children’s access and use of technologies that are constantly developing.

As research on the Australian experience illustrates, 85% of under 16s continue to use social media platforms, either by bypassing “simple” age verification mechanisms (i.e. being asked to enter their age), using fake profiles or (a challenge identified by the UK Government), on more rare occasions, using a VPN. Six months after its implementation, the effectiveness of the ban is not yet clear, however the Australian Government has since enacted new legislation to empower its regulator to monitor, enforce and punish non-compliance with the ban.

The UK’s under-16s social media ban must be executed with a view to also implementing alternative interventions that would target the effective enforcement of content moderation obligations by Ofcom. At the same time, a safe digital environment requires safer platform design, and access to resources that aim at improving digital literacy (with enhanced provisional support for the most vulnerable of young people).

Platforms as the real culprits?

On the one hand, the way in which online platforms are designed enhances the risk of harm to children by maximising user engagement. Such design choices include the use of addictive design features and recommender systems, weak default privacy settings and limited transparency, behavioural profiling and targeted and personalised advertising.

Research suggests that digital markets are characterised by substantial power, control and knowledge asymmetries between individuals and tech companies, which leads to an erosion of autonomy, manipulation, exploitation, and addiction as well as broader societal harms to fundamental rights and democratic participation. Digital environments are characterised by digital asymmetry, which describes the structural and systematic conditions of these systems, and leads to digital vulnerability, which is dynamic, contextual and structural; every individual is potentially vulnerable, a condition which may shift depending on the digital environment with which they are faced.

Children and young people may be particularly vulnerable (and are treated as such, for example, in consumer law), with social media exacerbating existing vulnerabilities (through for example, the use of recommender systems which direct vulnerable individuals to increasingly extreme content).

Digital literacy to prepare children for their digital adulthoods

On the other hand, greater digital literacy is required; young people under 16 will, within a few short years, be faced with digital environments which will very likely be vastly different, more complex and more dangerous than those currently in existence. In order to be able to navigate these regimes safely, young people must be equipped with the knowledge and critical analytical skills to – inter alia – recognise misinformation and malicious communication, assess algorithmic recommender systems and manipulative design features, make informed decisions and respond effectively to the risks arising from harmful online content. Under the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom has a key role to play in promoting media literacy.

However, what is clear is that the question as to whether the UK’s proposed social media ban for under 16s is appropriate and proportionate cannot be framed as giving rise to a binary choice; restrictions on children and young people’s access to social media must be implemented hand-in-hand with effective content moderation, the regulation of platform design and digital literacy endeavours.

Trump’s EU foreign policy, implicated scholarship and the ‘Brussels Effect’

Uta Kohl, 16 January 2026 —- 8 mins read

For Europe, the fierceness of the Trump administration’s hostility to the EU has come as a shock. It is unprecedented in scale and kind, and manifests itself in words (Vance’s speech in Munich attacking the EU over free speech and migration or Trump describing Europe as ‘decaying’ and its leaders as ‘weak’) and actions ( halting military aid to Ukraine, announcing 30% tariffs on the EU, or threatening to take Greenland by force). Yet, these hostilities do not come out of nowhere and build on a rise of transatlantic tensions over many US policy choices between 2000 -2024 and acceleration of those tensions over the last decade. Legal and international relations scholars have decried these developments as a breach of trust or, in some cases, a of international law. However, there appears to be little soul-searching about how we, as scholars, may be implicated in them. Whilst academia generally remains on the outskirts of day-to-day politics, we produce knowledge and narratives that create and shape discourses that have an impact on politics.

The Brussels Effect

One such popular academic narrative that has fed into the transatlantic hostilities is the ‘Brussels Effect’. The Brussels Effect was first coined by the Finnish-American scholar, Anu Bradford, in her article (2012) and book (2020) in which she purports to describe ‘how the European Union rules the world’. Her thesis is simple, namely that the EU can set – and has set – global regulatory standards by virtue of being a large and attractive market for many corporations from outside the EU that want to export into the EU and, then, by setting (strict) standards for these exporters who often have an incentive to adopt them as their global baseline. This de facto global harmonisation by corporate fiat is complemented by de jure global harmonisation as the home states of these corporations decide to follow the EU regulatory lead and enact like laws in their jurisdictions. Thus there is a global convergence towards EU standards without the political difficulties and cost associated with harmonisation efforts following formal processes. Effectively, the EU gets harmonisation on the cheap. European data protection law is widely seen as an example par excellence of the Brussels Effect as it has led to a widespread adoption of data protection laws around the globe.

Bradford’s Brussels Effect has been hugely successful as a seemingly objective and neutral synthesis of facts describing EU regulatory hyperactivity with extraterritorial effect. For the digital world, this seems particularly true considering the recent raft of EU legal instruments dealing with online platforms, such as Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act. There are many more (including corporate sustainability measures), and all of them have exterritorial reach as they apply to foreign providers that operate in the EU. The Brussels Effect has been referenced by thousands of scholars and taken up by EU policy makers and politicians with gusto, often as a badge of pride and honour.

And yet, there is more to the Brussels Effect than meets the eye. For a start, it is not simply a description of facts about EU regulation but a meta-narrative that puts a particular perspective or spin on facts. Meta-narratives are stories about stories, which explain, tie together, and legitimise or delegitimise smaller facts and events, and appeal as much to the emotions as they do to the intellect. Bradford’s article starts off by appealing to the sensitivities of the average American: ‘EU regulations have a tangible impact on the everyday lives of citizens around the world. Few Americans are aware that EU regulations determine the makeup they apply in the morning, the cereal they eat for breakfast, the software they use on their computer, and the privacy settings they adjust on their Facebook page. And that’s just before 8:30 AM.’(3)

The particular perspective of the Brussels Effect narrative is one of EU regulatory overreach. This charge is already implicit in the title of Bradford’s book: How the European Union Rules the World. Implicit in her argument is the question: Why should Europe rule the world? Centuries of European imperialism, including legal imperialism, are bygone and, if not, should be. Brussels should be ashamed of itself. By the same token, if the Brussels Effect narrative offers a legitimate critique of excessive EU law, then the Trump administration’s opposition to EU regulation of US platforms also strikes a legitimate chord. In that case, the large platforms may also be right in characterising the fines by the Commission under EU platforms regulations as ‘protectionist’, ‘discriminatory’ or ‘disguised tariffs’ or as ‘censorship’. Yet, does the EU really rule the world? Unlikely.

There are indeed good reasons why the Brussels Effect narrative is not plausible. Here are three. First, EU (digital) regulation seeks to regulate the European single market and must necessarily apply to foreign providers who do business in Europe. This is a standard jurisdictional approach adopted across the globe as it rightly protects local standards from being undermined by foreign providers. Second, when foreign corporations, like the US digital platforms, adopt European standards as their global baseline, this is a commercial decision driven by market forces. The EU cannot ‘choose’ this as a route to global harmonisation, but as a form of bottom-up harmonisation it can lend support and legitimacy to political harmonisation. Such market forces come and go, wholly outside the EU’s power. Third, whilst according to Bradford’s Brussels Effect the EU imposes its preference for ‘strict rules’ on ‘the rest of world’ (citing almost exclusively US examples), arguably the US and not the EU is the outlier in its preference for laissez-faire law, especially in respect of the tech platforms. Already in 2005, Frederick Schauer observed that the absolutist speech protection of the First Amendment was the odd one out internationally: ‘On a large number of other issues in which the preferences of individuals may be in tension with the needs of the collective, the United States, increasingly alone.’ Thus, it is far more plausible that EU regulations are simply more aligned with the public policies and interests of other jurisdictions than US laissez-faire law is.

The Washington Effect

If the Brussels Effect narrative paints a skewed picture of EU regulatory activism, it may be more compelling to understand EU regulations through the counter-narrative of the ‘Washington Effect’. A counter-narrative uses the same facts but tells a different story. In this case the story is that EU platform regulation is not an offensive extraterritorial strategy for Europe to attain global ‘superpower’ status, but rather a defensive territorial one that seeks to counter, in Europe, the hegemony of US platforms and US laissez-faire law. In other words, the EU is in pursuit of reclaiming digital sovereignty and perhaps even leads the global resistance to US legal imperialism.

The counter-narrative of the Washington Effect builds on the idea that deregulation is not nothing or neutral, but a form of regulation whereby existing legal standards are abandoned or watered down. It may occur within a jurisdiction through explicit deregulatory measures or across jurisdictions when the more permissive laws of one State undermine the more restrictive laws of another. Although deregulation appears to facilitate the ‘free’ market – free from state interference – even a free market is enabled by the general law of the land, such as contract and property law, corporation law, basic rules on fair competition, product liability or negligence law. Thus deregulation that meddles with these fundamental enabling market rules constitutes a significant regulatory intervention with the market, rather than a non-intervention. Such deregulatory interventions reconstitute the market and its distribution of rights, privileges, powers and authorities. In other words, deregulation also regulates.

There is plenty of evidence of the de facto or de jure imposition of US deregulation on ‘the rest of the world’. Most notably, section 230 Communications Decency Act (1996) which immunises platforms from liability (under the ordinary law of the land) for wrongful publications by third parties on their domains, is one such piece of deregulation that the US has successfully exported to more than 60 jurisdictions worldwide with an enormous effect on global networked space. Equally, a de facto Washington Effect occurred when US digital platforms – ‘socialised’ through US permissive laws, most notably US First Amendment jurisprudence – started to offer their services in Europe and elsewhere with minimal legal restraints built into their content distribution and ad revenue systems and when this starting position went unchallenged in Europe for decades. So perhaps it is the Washington Effect, not the Brussel Effect, that really shows who rules the world.

The moral of the story

Academic scholarship matters. It tells stories. The Brussels Effect is a story that has mattered. Its effects have been significant. It has lent credence to the Trump administration’s opposition to EU tech regulation. It has then put the EU on a regulatory backfoot and, at the same time, disguised quite how successfully Washington has exported its deregulatory regulation to the rest of the world. The Brussels Effect demonstrates that just because a narrative has intuitive appeal and in fact appeals to many, does not mean it’s a good story. This is a dangerous one.

For a more in-depth analysis of the topic, see Uta Kohl, ‘The Politics of the ‘Brussels Effect’ Narrative’, forthcoming in ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: PLATFORM REGULATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE (A. Koltay, R. Krotoszynski, B. Török, E. Laidlaw (eds), OUP, 2026)