The European Union is offering to make “illegal secret deals” with big tech companies to enable the censorship of social media, X boss Elon Musk has claimed.
In an X post published on July 12, Musk claims that the Commission is now targeting X due to its refusal to comply with the allegedly under-the-table agreement.
The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.
The other platforms accepted that deal.
𝕏 did not. https://t.co/4lKsaRsYoA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2024
“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” he said.
“The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
Musk’s post was in direct response to a statement issued by European Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager announcing that the EU had found X to be in breach of the Digital Services Act.
Vestager, along with the Commission’s self-styled “Digital Enforcer”, Thierry Breton, have accused X of breaking rules surrounding misinformation and transparency.
Breton in particular accused X of breaking the DSA with its new “blue checkmark” system, claiming that the system inherited from Twitter was originally designed to prove that information posted to the platform was reliable.
“Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information,” he claimed.
“Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users.”
Such claims have sparked backlash online, with netizens citing old Twitter documents showing that the former use of the blue checkmark was only to verify the identity of the user and not whether what they post is true.
X now runs the risk of being fined up to six per cent of its global turnover for the alleged breaches should it be unable to successfully overturn the decision.
Since October 2023, the European Commission has deployed the Digital Services Act 56 times against major online platforms and search engines, with more than 50 per cent of cases targeting Meta, X, and TikTok.
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— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) May 21, 2024
