The European Commission got fed up with asking Elon Musk to make X (the former Twitter) comply with the new European regulations (Digital Services Act, approved last summer) and is now going through the legal route. The European executive announced on Monday the opening of a formal investigation into compliance with this regulation for the company's risk management, content moderation (publication of illegal content or disinformation), transparency in the management of advertising, "dark practices" to push its users to contract the paid service and access to data for researchers.
On November 3, the European Commission had already warned the technology platform that it was allowing, against European regulations, the dissemination of illegal material about the Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel and the Israeli military response. Islamophobic or anti-Semitic content, as well as photographs and videos of explicit violence, are easily found on X.
The statement issued by the European Commission assures that the investigation already underway will focus on several areas:
-Compliance with the obligations imposed by the Digital Services Act in relation to the dissemination of illegal content in the European Union and the mitigation measures taken so far to prevent it:
Elon Musk, owner of "X". Photo: AFP
- Effectiveness of the measures taken to combat the manipulation of information, especially with respect to the effectiveness of the so-called "community notes" and other risk mitigation measures against electoral processes.
-The measures taken by X to increase the transparency of the platform, particularly with regard to the legal obligation to give access to the platform's data to scientific research.
Warning
European Commissioner for Transparency Margrethe Vestager said on Monday that "the greater the risk that large platforms pose to our society, the more specific the requirements of the Digital Services Act are. We take every violation of our rules very seriously and the evidence we have is enough to open an investigation against X."
His colleague, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market (who since Elon Musk bought X tried hard to get the platform to comply with European regulations, without much success in view of the opening of a formal investigation), said that with the new European regulations "the time when the big platforms behaved as they wanted because they felt too strong is over".
"We now have clear rules, obligations, strong surveillance and penalties (the fine can be as high as 6% of the company's global revenue) and we will use all our tools to protect our citizens and our democracy," he added.
European authorities fear that digital platforms such as X will experience a disinformation boom in the coming months, when Europeans are called to the polls in a continental election (on June 9) that will profoundly mark the course of the bloc for the next five years.
Elon Musk has threatened in the past to pull Twitter out of Europe, but its 112 million active users in the Old Continent (as he declared on February 17, 2023) make exiting the European market a blow that is difficult for the company to bear. If it is managed according to business criteria, of course.
PB