Freedom vs. responsibility? Musk and EU butt heads over online rules.
Elon Musk’s face-off with Europe started, fittingly, with a tweet. Having completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, he announced Oct. 28: “The bird is freed.”
The European Union’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, immediately tweeted back: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our [EU] rules.”
That exchange signaled the apparent collision course Twitter is set upon with the EU, whose regulators are behind the world’s most ambitious plan to date to govern what happens online. And ambition may be what they’ll need if they plan to take on a billionaire with a libertarian bent toward speech, a habit of online trolling, and near absolute power over a global social media platform.
Mr. Musk has personally antagonized prominent people and spread misinformation online. He’s let a number of far-right figures and others banned from the platform back on – including President Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson – after promising to install a committee to decide such matters. Just before the December holidays, he deactivated the accounts of a group of journalists who were covering him, only to reinstate some of
