Media education, regulation, and organizing against Big Tech in Europe | Ep. 7

Elon Musk wading into European politics is, at this point, just Tuesday. The interesting part of this episode isn't Musk himself, it's the response: Europeans organizing, building media literacy programs, and talking seriously about regulation instead of just posting angry threads about it. Say what you want about Brussels' instincts, but there's something almost refreshing about a continent that actually tries to build institutional responses to a problem instead of waiting for the outrage cycle to move on.

Here's where we'd push back, though. "Regulation" in this context has a way of becoming a euphemism for deciding who's allowed to have an opinion online. We've watched European regulators go after platforms with the enthusiasm of people settling old scores, and it's not always obvious the target is Big Tech's power rather than speech they simply don't like. Musk throwing his weight around in someone else's election is a real problem. So is a government deciding that the fix is to hand itself more control over what citizens are allowed to see and say.

The media literacy piece is the part worth taking seriously. Teaching people to recognize manipulation, whether it comes from a billionaire's algorithm or a state broadcaster, is a genuinely good instinct and one we could stand to borrow here. That's a far better bet than a regulatory regime that ends up looking a lot like the thing it claims to be fighting. Big Tech's power is real and deserves scrutiny. Just don't be surprised when the cure starts looking like the disease.