Elon Musk’s Twitter profile is seen on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos on this picture illustration taken April 28, 2022.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
A top European Union official had a warning for Elon Musk Friday about his $44 purchase of Twitter, telling the billionaire he can have to play by the foundations.
After a cryptic tweet from Musk suggesting he’d accomplished his acquisition of Twitter, Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the interior market, warned Musk that he can have to comply with the bloc’s latest digital regulations.
“The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted. In response, Breton quote-tweeted Musk saying: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”
Although not officially confirmed, a spokesperson for crypto exchange Binance, which provided Musk equity financing for the Twitter takeover, said Friday the transaction had been accomplished.
Musk, certainly one of Twitter’s hottest users, is thought for tweeting all the pieces from announcements about Tesla and his other corporations, to memes and attacks on his critics.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has previously called himself a “free speech absolutist,” and says he desires to reform Twitter as a “digital town square” with fewer restrictions on what users can say.
That can have ramifications for the way in which content is moderated on Twitter, a key concern for regulators trying to rein in digital giants over the spread of hate speech and disinformation online.
Under the European Union’s recently approved Digital Services Act, large tech corporations will probably be required to have robust content moderation systems to make sure they will quickly take down illegal material resembling hate speech, incitement to terrorism and child sexual abuse.
For his part, Musk has said he would not allow illegal content on the platform.
The EU’s rules are expected to come back into force by 2024. Firms will be fined as much as 6% of world annual revenues for violations.
Guy Verhofstadt, a member of the European Parliament, said Friday that “the necessity for rules and accountability is greater than ever.”
“So one man @elonmusk now owns the most important debate on the earth …” he said in a tweet. “Self-regulation in social media has never worked … even with lesser characters than his.”
Breton, a former CEO of French IT consulting firm Atos, is seen as a key architect of the European Union’s digital reforms. Alongside the Digital Markets Act, which seeks to curb the dominance of web giants, the Digital Services Act is an element of a daring plan by the bloc to control Big Tech.
In May, Musk and Breton met in person, and Musk on the time said the Digital Services Act was “exactly aligned with my considering.”
But regulators on each side of the Atlantic are frightened that Musk could, for instance, allow former President Donald Trump back onto the platform. Musk, who has previously said he would reverse the ban on Trump’s account, reportedly intends to scrap lifetime bans on Twitter users, in keeping with Bloomberg.
