European governments framing social media bans for minors as child protection are quiet about what those bans actually require: identity checks for everyone. Every adult who wants to use Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube in France, Spain, or Germany would need to verify their real-world identity to access the platform. Anonymity, one of the oldest protections for dissenting speech, goes with it.
That’s the context Emmanuel Macron left out when he called free speech online “pure bullshit” in New Delhi on Wednesday.
The French president was addressing companies and their American backers as European governments push social media restrictions, as well as curbs on “hate speech,” a move the Trump administration has criticized as censorship.
Macron’s counterargument is based on algorithmic opacity. “Having no clue about how their algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained, and where it will guide you, the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge,” he said.
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“Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another.”
Recommendation systems do shape what people see, and the companies running them don’t publish the details. But Macron isn’t actually proposing algorithmic transparency. He’s defending a regulatory agenda that mandates age verification, which means ID verification, which means governments and platforms knowing exactly who is speaking before they’re allowed to speak.
Anonymous speech has a history worth defending. Whistleblowers, dissidents, journalists protecting sources, abuse survivors, political minorities in hostile regions: these are the people who depend on the ability to speak without attaching their name to it. Age verification systems don’t carve out exceptions for them. They require a real identity for everyone, or the system doesn’t work.
The EU’s Digital Services Act goes further. Beyond the ID checks, it requires platforms to police content flagged as harmful under definitions that include “hate speech,” a category European regulators get to define, redefine, and apply at their discretion.
The US has already imposed visa bans on a former European official and activists involved in enforcing these standards, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling the effort pushback against the global censorship-industrial complex.
The chilling effect of social media digital ID checks is the point. When people know their real name is attached to their account and that “harmful” speech (defined by the government) can get that account deleted, they say less. They avoid the contentious, the political, the inconvenient.
In unprecedented moves, France has previously arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and has raided the offices of X.
Macron is in New Delhi promoting a vision of regulated, multilingual AI as a third path between the US market model and China’s state-led approach. He frames European governance as the responsible alternative. What it looks like from the speech side is a system where governments decide who can speak anonymously (no one), what content platforms can host (whatever regulators don’t call harmful), and which companies can operate (those willing to build the ID infrastructure the bans require).
