A top European regulator demanded Elon Musk remove “misinformation” and “illegal content” about the Israel-Hamas conflict from the billionaire’s social media website, X.
Thierry Bretton, the European Commissioner for the European Union’s internal market, issued a warning to Mr. Musk last week in a letter that was posted X last week and accused the platform of not blocking posts around the conflict. He said that regulations about “illegal content” could lead to penalties, including a 6 percent reduction of the firm’s annual revenue.
Groups are spreading alleged misinformation and “violent and terrorist” content on the platform, he said.
The X platform needs to be “ very transparent and clear” on the content that is allowed under the terms and conditions and “enforce your own policies,” it said. “We have, from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities,” the letter said, without naming the sources or posts.
The EU regulator then demanded X, formerly known as Twitter, respond to his letter within 24 hours. So far, Mr. Musk hasn’t released a public statement about the matter.
Instead, X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Thursday released information about actions taken by X to go after certain types of content on the platform following the outbreak of the conflict on Oct. 7. The platform has removed hundreds of accounts associated with Hamas and has taken down thousands of posts after the attack on Israel, she said.
The platform has been “responding promptly” and in a “diligent and objective manner” to takedown requests from law enforcement agencies from around the world, including more than 80 from EU member states, Ms. Yaccarino said.
Other Warnings
It isn’t the first time the EU regulator made a threatening comment to Mr. Musk about content policies. Earlier this year, Mr. Breton said that the platform still has “obligations” after he pulled out of the bloc’s “Code of Practice.”At the time, Jacob Mchangama, a Danish historian, sounded the alarm about the Digital Services Act late last year, writing in an opinion article that the act would be a case of the “cure” being “worse than the disease.”
“But when it comes to regulating speech, good intentions do not necessarily result in desirable outcomes,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that the law is a cure worse than the disease, likely to result in serious collateral damage to free expression across the EU and anywhere else legislators try to emulate it.”
Although “removing illegal content sounds innocent enough,” the historian wrote that it’s not. That term—”illegal content”—is “defined very differently across Europe,” he said. “In France, protesters have been fined for depicting President Macron as Hitler, and illegal hate speech may encompass offensive humor,” while “Austria and Finland criminalize blasphemy.”
