Elon Musk’s X Platform is on the verge of facing fines in the hundreds of millions of euros after EU tech regulators ruled they had violated their digital advertising regulations. Musk revealed that the EU wanted to do a secret deal with the company to ban and throttle accounts and posts according to what EU officials told them to do.
Musk claims they wanted this done secretly so that the public wasn’t aware it was being censored as a direct result of government direction of private enterprise. Musk has declared his intentions to sue the EU Commission, communicating with them directly through X, “We look forward to a very public battle in court.” To wit, the Commissioner, Thierry Breton, responded “Be our guest.”
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Excerpt from www.rt.com
EU offered X secret censorship deal – Musk
X (formerly Twitter) is facing persecution by the European Union because it rejected Brussels’ demand to secretly censor opinions on the platform, its owner Elon Musk has revealed.
The EU announced on Friday that it considered X in violation of its Digital Services Act (DSA) and intended to levy massive fines against the company unless it changed its practices.
“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” Musk wrote in response. “The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
“We look forward to a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth,” he added.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, after voicing displeasure over widespread censorship on the social media platform. He has since unbanned most blocked accounts, including that of former President Donald Trump.
When Musk announced “the bird is freed,” one of the responses came from Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Breton said, with a reference to the DSA.
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Excerpt from reuters
EU charges X with deceiving users via blue checkmark, draws Musk’s ire
Elon Musk’s social media company X breached European Union online content rules and its blue checkmark deceives users, EU tech regulators ruled on Friday in a finding that could lead to a hefty fine and significant changes in how it operates.The charges by the European Commission, the first issued under the Digital Services Act (DSA), follow a seven-month long investigation. The new rules require very large online platforms and search engines to do more to tackle illegal content and risks to public security.
Elon Musk to sue the EU Commission after accusations of X breaching digital rulebook
Elon Musk said he will take the European Commission to court after the EU executive accused social media platform X of breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) over its verified accounts policy and lapses in transparency, in preliminary findings released on Friday (12 July).
“We look forward to a very public battle in court,” X Chairmain and CTO Musk said in an X post late on the same day. He was responding to an earlier post by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton’s post on the Commission’s preliminary findings on X.
“Be our guest,” Breton responded on the platform within the hour. X wanted to learn how it can settle with the Commission, an option under the DSA, he said, implying that the company never followed up with commitments, which in turn led to the accusation of non-compliance.
On Friday morning, the Commission released preliminary findings on X’s non-compliance under the DSA. These are the Commissions’ first findings under the landmark content moderation regulation, Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice-president, said on Friday.
