Musk’s Free Speech Plans For Twitter Clash With EU Content Rules
Elon Musk's plans for Twitter might run into a major hurdle: the European Union.
The continent's regulations have been a headache for Silicon Valley for years, and Musk -- a so-called “free speech absolutist” -- could soon feel the pain.
Hours after Elon Musk tweeted that he had “freed” the bird, a reference to Twitter's logo, the European Commission's Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that in Europe “the bird will fly by” the EU's content moderation rules.
The EU's Digital Services Act, which officially became law this month, gives the bloc's executive arm, the European Commission, unprecedented powers to police tech platforms by requiring them to remove illegal content ranging from terrorist propaganda to ads for unsafe toys.
Breton already warned Musk in the spring that his free-speech approach would have to follow the DSA. “I don't care what he's doing outside of Europe,” Breton told Bloomberg Television in April. “You want to enter into Europe? These are our rules.”
The EU has never shied from policing Big Tech. Violating the union's landmark data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation, already resulted in a €450,000 ($448,360) fine for Twitter back in 2020, while Amazon. com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc.'s WhatsApp and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have been slapped with fines in the tens of millions of euros.
Soon, the commission will have even more power to police Big Tech. The Digital Markets Act will force tech companies designated as “gatekeepers” to abide by new antitrust rules. But the biggest problem for Musk will be its sister legislation, the DSA.
Potential Fines
The main goal of the legislation is to ensure companies do better at finding and removing illegal content, but
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