On December 24, 2025, the official EU account, @DigitalEU, posted a promotional message on the X platform, advocating for the Digital Services Act (DSA). The post prominently emphasized: "No space for cyberbullying. No space for dangerous products. No space for hate speech. No space for scams." It concluded by adding: "With the Digital Services Act, what is illegal offline remains illegal online."
The post included a promotional image intended to demonstrate that the EU will strictly require major online platforms to manage harmful and illegal content in order to create a safer digital environment.
Vitalik: Don't go down the path of "sterilization" online authoritarianism
However, just two days later, on December 26, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin directly quoted the post and published a lengthy response expressing strong concerns. He believes that the extreme expression "no space" reflects a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse, which is incompatible with the nature of a free society.
Vitalik points out that on subjective and controversial issues, attempting to completely eliminate content that the other side considers "pathogens" can easily lead to conflict due to well-intentioned disagreements, and may ultimately establish a mechanism of technocratic authoritarianism to forcibly suppress dissent. He emphasizes that free societies must accept that some people will sell dangerous goods or spread statements considered disinformation; this is the price of pluralism.
Vitalik further criticized the current problem with the X (formerly Twitter) platform, stating that the issue isn't the existence of a few extreme viewpoints, but rather the massive, algorithm-driven push and cramming of such content onto users. He argued that the correct goal isn't to build "walls" to completely isolate harmful content, but rather to allow it to naturally prevent bad content from dominating the environment, much like a biological ecosystem. He cited the absence of tropical lizards in European forests as an example, suggesting that incentive mechanisms should be used to reduce, rather than increase, such content on platforms, and mentioned that Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang (@audreyt) had discussed a similar approach.
In terms of solutions, Vitalik advocates a "Pirate Party" approach to user empowerment, including increasing platform openness, algorithm transparency (such as requiring a 1-2 year delay in releasing algorithms and verifying them with zero-knowledge proofs), enhancing interoperability to promote competition, and developing privacy-preserving macro-level community analysis tools to make it easier for users to identify information sources. He emphasizes that this approach is the only way to truly defend freedom of speech and pluralism, and avoid turning it into a false freedom dominated by a few technocrats.
