A public spat between Elon Musk and the EU has raised concerns in Europe about the EU's ability to exert power over the vast social media platform X as disinformation and deepfakes stomp on political discord and spark riots in the UK.
Europe has taken a tougher stance on regulating digital platforms than the United States, but the issue has come into greater focus since Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, about two years ago as he drastically cut the company's moderators, reinstated previously banned accounts and ramped up his own outspoken postings.
At the same time, the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the EU new powers to enforce sweeping rules in areas like disinformation and advertising, including what one official who helped craft the rules called a “nuclear weapon”: the ability to block access to social networks across the region.
“We are really on the brink of an era of tougher enforcement,” said Georg Rieckeles, deputy director at the European Policy Centre, who said Musk's confrontation with the EU represented a pivotal moment in the EU's fight against powerful online platforms.
He added that Musk had shown “how technology can be weaponized.”
EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton posted a letter this week X hours before the billionaire Musk was to give an interview to US presidential candidate Donald Trump on Facebook, warning that sanctions under the DSA would be applied “in full force” if Musk failed to curb “illegal content”.
Both Musk and the Trump campaign responded angrily, with Musk posting a meme from the film Tropic Thunder and telling Breton to “take a step back and literally go fuck yourself in the face.”
The EU's Digital Services Act gives social media companies powerful tools to curb the worst excesses of false online content on their platforms, including the ability to impose fines of up to 6% of their turnover. © Adam Gray/Reuters
Through X, Musk has positioned himself as a defender of free speech and criticized what he calls censorship under the DSA, while the Trump campaign responded to Breton's letter by saying, “The European Union is an enemy of free speech and has no authority to dictate how we conduct our election campaign.”
The European Commission was quick to deny Breton's involvement, saying “the timing and wording of the letter had not been coordinated or agreed with other commissioners.”
This adds to tensions that have been building since December when X became the first platform to come under investigation under the DSA for not being transparent about its advertising and allowing the distribution of content deemed illegal in the EU. The European Commission has since filed cases against Facebook and Instagram owner Meta for breaching rules on underage use, as well as against video-sharing platform TikTok over its bounty scheme.
The DSA, introduced in 2022, gives Brussels a powerful tool to curb the worst excesses of false online content on platforms, at least in theory. Platforms found to have violated the rules, which set new standards for policing hate speech, fake images and videos, and disinformation, can be fined up to 6% of their revenue.
According to the law, if the platform continues to cause “significant harm”, the European Commission can order telecommunications operators in the EU country where the company is based to block access to the site.
“At some point, you have some very powerful tools in your toolbox, but it's a question of whether you want to use them,” Rieckeles said.
Losing access to the EU would significantly reduce X's user base, which has seen growth slow since Musk bought it. The platform said X had 111 million monthly active users in the EU in the six months to January, more than a sixth of the 600 million users the billionaire said it has registered.
Katharina Goanta, associate professor of consumer law and technology at Utrecht University, said the current “standoff” with Company X was a “very unfortunate” situation for Europe and could complicate the investigation.
“The Commission cannot simply say it will impose these rules on Meta and TikTok but not on X,” she said.
Musk himself has 194 million followers, making him the most followed person on X. But an analysis this month by the Digital Hate Countermeasures Center found that at least 50 of his posts about the 2024 US presidential election – collectively viewed more than 1.2 billion times on the platform – had been debunked as false by independent fact-checkers.
Musk also shared a ton of content in connection with the far-right riots in the UK this month, including content mocking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and suggesting the UK was prioritising the protection of Muslims and minorities over white protesters.
Police officers dealing with a mob in Rotherham, England, earlier this month © Hollie Adams/Reuters
In the UK, the Online Safety Act was passed in September after years of wrangling, but it will take several months to be fully implemented. The law only targets misinformation when the content is deliberately false and distributed with the intent to cause “serious mental or physical harm to its intended audience.”
The bill gives Britain's media regulator, Ofcom, broad powers to crack down on big tech companies that fail to curb illegal content, such as hate speech or incitement to violence, including imposing fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue and criminal charges for named senior executives. As in the EU, in “extreme cases,” Ofcom could ask internet service providers to stop working with a site, effectively blocking it in Britain.
Rieckeles said a tougher US stance against big tech companies under President Joe Biden's administration paved the way for more aggressive action in Europe.
An official working with Company X in Brussels said the company had generally acted appropriately during the commission's investigation.
But Goanta added that even if X wanted to comply with the DSA, it may have difficulty meeting its obligations after the moderation team was cut, especially in monitoring non-English content. X said in April that it only employed one content moderator with professional proficiency in Latvian and Polish, for example, and no moderators who spoke Dutch.
But Ken Dailey, an antitrust lawyer at Sidley Austin, said the committee is playing a “constant game of cat and mouse” with companies and needs to be careful not to come across as “completely anti-business and threatening to drive out big, popular companies.”
“(Musk) is clearly being provocative and trying to force the committee to take further action,” he added.
The question is whether the politicians who frequently post on X are willing to stand up to Musk.
A British government official said “we're not going to get into an argument with Musk about X,” as Breton did, and that the UK is focused on making sure platforms can act when the government's disinformation team flags posts of concern. The company has been slow to respond to some requests to remove content of concern, but is working to reduce the visibility of other posts, the official said.
Shadow security secretary Tom Tugendhat said that while some of Musk's comments were “delusional” and “simply false”, the UK government was outside its powers to reprimand or sanction Musk given that his company operates overseas and is accountable to shareholders (in this case Musk himself).
EU officials said privately they feared Breton's letter would backfire and further embolden the firebrand tycoon.
“Personally I think it was completely unnecessary and completely unhelpful,” one person said.
Jan Philipp Albrecht, head of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung think tank and a former EU lawmaker, said the EU should consider stepping up efforts against social media platforms by subjecting them to defamation laws in the same way as the media, which could be held liable for content along with the posters.
More broadly, he said, “We can't just stand by and wait for Musk to return to mature behavior. We have to make sure he abides by the rule of law.”
