The tech mogul’s platform is the first to get hit with charges under new EU social media law.
The European Union is calling Elon Musk to order over how he turned social media site X into a haven for disinformation and illegal content.
The EU Commission on Friday formally charged X for failing to respect EU social media law. The platform could face a sweeping multi-million euro fine in a pioneering case under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), a law to clamp down on toxic and illegal online content and algorithms.
Musk’s X has been in Brussels’ crosshairs ever since the billionaire took over the company, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022. X has been accused of letting disinformation and illegal hate speech run wild, roll out misleading authentication features and blocking external researchers from tools to scrutinize how malicious content on the platforms spreads.
The European Commission oversees X and two dozens of the world’s largest online platforms including Facebook, YouTube and others. The EU executive’s probe into Musk’s firm opened in December 2023 and was the first formal investigation. Friday’s charges are the first-ever under the DSA.
Infringements of the DSA could lead to fines of up to 6 percent of a X’s global revenue.
The issues with the US bulling their way in here is that while they set themselves up as the arbiters of free speech… these are not your counties. These are democratic institutions who have made independently made these decisions based on their concepts of what constitutes safeguarding the welfare of their citizens. They have determined that repeat targetted provably untrue propaganda based out of intellectual dishonesty that is designed to leave people angry at minorities creates conditions where people logically come to the conclusion that the killing, oppressing and subjugation of people to the point they see death as preferable to life is not okay.
The version of “free speech” that constantly gets toted as a universal good is essentially an experiment. When you see how something is functionally shaping your society and you see that while aspects of it are very healthy and cause additional stability and protection to people but a misuse is causing some people to be treated as subhuman then it’s time to amend the rules. A government should be held accountable for the welfare of all it’s citizens and those non-citizens whom it has temporary sovereignty over. Each country has the right to determine how best to initiate that directive. You are very welcome to defend your version of free speech as defined by American sensibilities on American ground, but American meddling in the ethics of countries whose value systems deal in more nuance would be very unwelcome. Quite frankly since the application of “free speech” under American terms has caused so much political stratification in their own homeland to the point where civil war or a breakdown of other democratic norms are snowballing they need to see to their own house before they can critique other nations.