> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.
That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.
Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
Even under previous Twitter management, there were a lot of verified accounts who weren't celebrities by any reasonable definition. So only a moron would have ever believed that "blue checkmark = celebrity". We can't protect morons from themselves and it's pointless to even try.
Calling people stupid is a common and low-quality excuse to not regulate. It's part of how societies start to fail. If some percentage of people are mistaken about something, the reality of that is all that matters, regardless of how stupid you personally think those people are.
Nah. There's no evidence to support your claim. You're just making things up to try to find a plausible, friendly sounding excuse to justify government censorship. Citation needed.
Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Government regulation can never change that reality.
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
And the EU is right. Elons blue check boosting logic absolutely violated those laws. Other companies played by the rules and made their systems DSA compliant. Elon did not, now he needs to pay.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said
I thought the blue check mark always indicated that account name on Twitter matched the person behind the account. That’s it. They eventually expanded that to include non-famous people.
Kyrie Irving (an NBA player known for conspiracies like flat earthism) had a blue check - no one would ever mistake him for a trustworthy source of information.
If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.
Article 25, clause 1:
> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.
These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.
They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.
I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
>They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
It also means enterprising prosecutors and regulators can use it as a cudgel against their opponents. As others have mentioned, the checkmark already meant very little when it came to whether the poster was trustworthy or not. It's like fining Chrome and Firefox for accepting letsencrypt certificates, because previously there was a $10 cost to having a lock appear on your site, and letsencrypt making it free misleads users.
It does. I don't think this example is as good as you think, though. You used to have to give out your full legal name and address and have them verified to get an SSL certificate and the lock icon. When any random website could get the lock icon, this did indeed lead to more people typing their passwords into phishing sites, thinking they were real because they had the lock icon, and this was indeed a real problem.
They could have chosen to only show the lock for EV certificates, and show something else, or no icon, for DV certificates, but instead they made a choice that was misleading. Google probably should have been fined for that, but not very much, because it wasn't foreseen. I think Mozilla was still a non-profit at the time.
The DSA ruling was wrong. The blue checkmark never indicated trustworthy sources of information. Even under previous Twitter management, verified accounts routinely posted misinformation and disinformation. Thierry Breton is either an idiot or lying to push a political narrative.
The trustworthy information that blue check marks indicated was not that the /contents of the message/ were objectively trustworthy, but that /a specific person was willing to be associated with the contents of the message/. That’s what was lost.
Are you saying you think the semantics of that is anywhere near worth a billion dollar fine? When the changes were clearly communicated, and reported on by the press!
In that case, what about the CSAM problem on the Meta-owned platforms? How many billions should that be?
> Are you saying you think the semantics of that is anywhere near worth a billion dollar fine?
Did you reply to the correct post? My post was about what trustworthy information was removed, not about my assessment of worth or interpretation of a law in a nation where I’m not a citizen or a lawyer…
This is not about the blue check marks at all. It's about X not censoring information to the EU's tastes, and them finding something... anything, to punish Elon for it.
> Unlike Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, which are publicly traded, X is owned solely by Mr. Musk. EU regulators are considering using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX. That increases the potential penalty to well over $1 billion, one person said.
Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
Neither NYT nor the EU is wrong. Elon's companies are, to him, fungible, with employees able to be used in any company, like when Elon borrowed engineers employed at Tesla and SpaceX to work on Twitter when he bought it. These are all separate companies on paper, but Elon treats the workers as interchangeable. He acts as if they are all owned by him, so the EU is treating them as he treats them.
Most countries' company law has a clause that says if you violate company boundaries like this, they're effectively one company. Otherwise you could use this sort of thing to limit your liability well in excess of intended (the primary purpose of company law is to establish carve-outs in which you can perform business with limited liability).
While others certainly have a financial interest in it, it is not publicly traded and Musk solely controls it. For instance, he just unilaterally sold it to another of his privately held companies, xAI, for a valuation he made up.
Musk's privately held companies, and to a large degree Tesla as well, are all things he treats as effectively one big company that he controls; he'll take employees from one to another at will, he sells them to each other or spins them out at will in all stock transactions, etc.
The EU regulations allow seeing through such sham company boundaries that are all controlled by a single entity, and treating them as a single company.
"Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that the two companies had been collaborating closely and the deal would drive deeper integration with Grok, the investor said."
Now, he may have only been talking about xAI investors here, but it seems pretty clear from his actions that Musk pretty much demands full control of his companies, and if he does involve the other investor's they're likely rubber-stamping without much opportunity to push back.
I guess at some point the EU has to do something if they want companies to keep implementing these regulations under the calculus of “cost of implementation vs. cost of fines that arise from non-compliance”.
I would love to believe that some companies would follow these regulations even without severe threat, because they’re the right thing to do for users, but I know in a lot of cases it can take significant time, effort, and money to keep up with every regulation coming out of the EU
Once upon a time these companies valued their user base, afraid they would leave and find another way to use their time. I guess they’ve got the data that their users are all addicted and will never do that. At least until they push too hard.
Unfair business practices and quasi monopolies (Microsoft), waled gardens (apple), and in the past 15 years advanced data analysis let's those companies exactly calculate how far they can make their users "suffer/bleed/annoy" and stop just right before the breaking point.
Also, if real competition arises, it's just bought and merged (Facebook buying instagram) since anti-trust laws have not been properly applied, especially in the digital sector.
And then the breaking point becomes the new normal, and the new breaking point becomes farther away.
Microsoft keeps deleting ways to install Windows without signing up for a Microsoft account.
Twice in my life I've created a Microsoft account to do something that required a Microsoft account, and then a few days later they demanded my phone number. Because they know perfectly well that if you demand a phone number during signup, it deters more people from signing up, but if you demand it after they've already started using their account, they're less likely to be willing to throw away the account. I was, though.
For some reason they haven't yet done that with my Minecraft-migrated account. Or did they? Maybe I entered my phone number there and forgot I did so.
It's really tough to apply anti-trust law to companies that aren't selling commodities. What would or wouldn't count as a competitor to Instagram? Since it's free for end users, the customers are mostly advertisers. And they have a zillion other channels to get their message out. Meta hardly has anything approaching a monopoly for either advertisers or consumers. Consumers frequently post pictures on X, LinkedIn, Google Photos, Strava, Snapchat, etc.
> It's really tough to apply anti-trust law to companies that aren't selling commodities.
The EU, rather famously, managed with Microsoft. It's mostly the US that's beholden to large corporations over people, rather than it being an intractible problem.
> Meta hardly has anything approaching a monopoly for either advertisers or consumers
Meta does not command the lions share of the time spent on social media, but claiming >20% of revenue is oligopoly territory [0,1]
> Consumers frequently post pictures on X, LinkedIn, Google Photos, Strava, Snapchat
Do you really belive LinkedIn and Google Photos compete with SnapChat and Facebook for "Sharing photos with friends on social media"? If so, you might as well throw Flikr and Imgur on your list, though I wouldn't count them in the same market either.
When there's a significant opportunity for growth in userbase, corporate social media is good to users. Once that plateaus, they look to grow something else, usually advertising revenue.
The current incentive structure rewards growth more than a stable profitable state, which I think is a mistake.
that's because of the network effect: while you're a small part of people's network, you can be replaced easily. once you've connected 60-90% of their network (including the sort of people they follow online, not necessary people they meet in meatspace), you don't need to worry too much about getting replaced.
> Once upon a time these companies valued their user base
Because that's what was bringing profit then. We should never forget, that's the whole point of capitalism: companies maximize profit. Companies are not human beings with emotions, they are profit-maximizing entities.
They evolve in a framework set by regulations. The society, made of human beings with emotions, is supposed to define that framework in such a way that what makes companies profitable is also good for the people.
Indeed. I'm European and I also see the EU's "banning of disinformation" as a form of censorship in gift wrapping. What about the government disinformation during covid? Did they punish anyone for that?
Vague and ambiguous laws like these against disinformation enable selective enforcement for the governments to make sure their PoVs go though the media and everything they deem inappropriate or a threat to their authority gets shut down.
Those in power in Brussels are afraid of communication channels they can't control as people become more and more dissatisfied and irate with their leaders, policies and QoL reductions, so they push laws like these plus the ones trying to backdoor encrypted communications in order to gain control over the narrative, monitor and crush any potential uprisings before they even occur.
I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation. The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked. Maybe even better public education could work, and then they wouldn't need to censor it because nobody would believe it anyway?
>I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation.
There is no silver bullet solution since we're not in an utopia. On the one hand all private media is controlled by biased oligarchs each with their own interests. On the other hand, governments in power want to control the narrative towards their own interests hence why in many EU countries we have state media. This is how it's always been and how it's always gonna be, a constant tug of war between interest groups, but I don't want any one side to have complete control of the media as that would be even worse.
>The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked.
Why do you think it hasn't worked? To me it seems like it's working, that's why those in power fear it and want to control it all for themselves.
My parents lived under communism. The speech control the EU is pushing resembles very well what communism had but with a better PR spin on it. Communism got defeated in part by total freedom of speech winning in the free market place of ideas versus government controlled speech. The Arab Spring revolutions could not have happened without the free media circulating on the internet. So to see the EU trying to lock down on free speech the same way totalitarian regime did, is incredibly suspicious to me like their afraid of their own people revolting against them.
I don't want unelected elites in Brussels deciding for me what content and opinions I should be allowed to view. If you want to win in the free marketplace of ideas, then come up with arguments for the people on why you consider each piece of information to be misinformation and debate it in public, not just ban it outright.
The free marketplace idea obviously has not worked to combat disinformation, because we're trying the radical free marketplace idea and so many people are believing so much disinformation that they're threatening to destroy every western country. One of them is already destroying itself, not just threatening to.
That is a symptom, not a cause. That means education system is bad and has failed people, OR, that people are so desperate with their living standards that they're not disinformed but they just want to take revenge on the establishment that has failed them by voting extremes.
Either way, those are symptoms, not the cause so I don't believe government enforced censorship is the solution because that's exactly what totalitarian regimes did when people were unhappy. The solution is for the establishment to accept they have failed the people and start to do good for the people or step down.
This means the democratic system IS working as intended, as if you were to censor speech and take away peoples' only legal way of protesting (voting), then their next alternatives is violence and uprising.
> That means education system is bad and has failed people
What if the education system can't fix this? Not just the current one - any education system.
> that people are so desperate with their living standards
What if people's propensity to believe utter bullshit is independent of their financial situation?
> Either way, those are symptoms, not the cause
What if the tendency to believe bullshit is the cause? You have failed to prove it isn't, so your proposed solutions probably won't work and indeed may make matters much worse.
If your nation's education is so bad that 51% of the population buys into disinformation with no way of convincing them otherwise, then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate. Might as well give up on democracy and anoint an emperor or king to rule over you, because there's no point in cosplaying as a democracy if you're not planning to respect the will of the majority at the elections.
>Not just the current one - any education system.
Switzerland and nordic countries like Denmark seem to be quite well educated, highly transparent, low corruption and a decent democracy. So it is possible.
>What if people's propensity to believe utter bullshit is independent of their financial situation?
People's political biases are ALWAYS tied to their wealth, education and social class. Just compare a map with wealth/income distribution with a map with blue/red voters.
>What if the tendency to believe bullshit is the cause?
> then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate.
Or, you know, you try to limit the spreading of disinfo, simply to protect the weak.
We could for example have a talk about how the people most prone to fall for disinfo are the old and farthest removed from the reach of the education system.
> if you're not planning to respect the will of the majority
You are the one who is not respecting the will of the majority. The government is formed by majority coalition coming from the elections, and the government is doing this. The will of the majority is respected by fighting the disinformation.
> Switzerland and nordic countries seem to be quite well educated and a decent democracy. So it is possible.
Nordic countries are part of the EU and on board with these policies, so no idea what are you on about here.
> People's political biases are always tied to their wealth and social class. Just compare a map with wealth/income distribution with a map with blue/red voter.
It would be nice if you tried to engage with what I wrote and not something completely different.
> If your nation's education is so bad that 51% of the population buys into disinformation with no way of convincing them otherwise, then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate. Might as well give up on democracy
Since giving up on democracy in this situation is a good thing, according to you, will you finally stop complaining about it?
You still didn't tell me what you think should be done about it. I understand from your vague gestures that the answer is "nothing", perhaps because you enjoy the fact that developed world powers are crumbling to dust. There are reasonable reasons one might hold that position, but if that is in fact your position, you should acknowledge it.
> I don't believe [X] is the solution because that's exactly what totalitarian regimes did
Hitler also ate sugar. Ban sugar!
> The solution is for the establishment to accept they have failed the people and start to do good for the people or step down.
This contradicts your stated position, because preventing disinformation is good for the people, but you don't think the establishment should do it.
> This means the democratic system IS working as intended, as if you were to censor speech and take away peoples' only legal way of protesting (voting)
Very obvious non-sequitur. What do penalties against the app formerly known as Twitter have to do with taking away voting rights?
lol, your comment reads as: "This comment asks me to suggest a fix, and I don't have one, so I will pretend that the other poster isn't worth responding to for unrelated reasons."
I remember the communism. Boy, you have no idea. And, frankly, your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive.
>your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive
That's how boiling the frog works. Where do you think you'll end up if you give the government authority to decide what information is right or wrong for you to have access to?
What happens when Ursula v.d Leyen decides that her scandal involving the deleted email is "disinformation" and has a friendly judge call for it to be scrubbed from media and search engines?
You can't and should never blindly trust governments with them having your well being at heart. The main goal of a government is to stay in power, by any mean necessary in order to help those who finance their careers and campaigns.
If you can't see the slope between this speech police path and becoming an USSR-Light minus the gulags and executions, then maybe you're the offensive one.
Technically, "slippery slope" isn't a fallacy. It's just a name for the idea that one thing leads inevitably to another. It's not fallacious to extrapolate from past experience, even if that extrapolation turns out to be wrong.
Arguing A->B is only a fallacy if no argument for the sequence is provided. A plausible argument was provided here based on prior experience of other governments. There's no fallacy if you just disagree on the probability.
Hitler seizing power and the Nazis invading Poland was also a fallacy. Until it wasn't. The NSA spying on everyone was also a fallacy. Until it wasn't. Go back in time and find other examples.
Any extreme powers you give the government to "keep you safe", they will eventually be abused, first against foreigners, political dissidents and whistleblowers, then against you.
History doesn't necessarily repat itself, but it definitely rhymes.
Your comment is disinformation. This is not a problem that needs to be fixed. There is no need for governments to force private companies to act as censors. The free marketplace of ideas is working better than ever.
If you're unhappy with the current situation then do something positive by working to improve critical thinking education in your own country's schools.
EU isn't the only entity with regulations and interests. Which creates a lot of conflicts. Like free speech is limited in EU and less so in USA. Should company in USA implement EU restrictions on USA users? What if both EU and USA users are in the same chat. EU is going to go after Mask's other companies. In other words EU plays dirty as usual, just like with Russian's money. Same story with Telegram. At some point it will backfire.
That's also been the issue for decades with the financial industry: the fines and probability of getting caught are far less (and already 'priced' in) vs the big profits.
And if the shit really hits the fan, they know that the government is going to pay to rescue them with taxpayer money (just one example: financial crisis of 2008).
This is the first sentence in it, which links to the New York Times article the submission was changed to:
> European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
There is another comment that answers "why" I assume dang doesn't have the time to answer all of these individually. But tl;dr it's in the guidelines for posting on the site why this happened.
if i had to guess: NYT was the original source of the news and Ars is just reporting on NYT reporting. Or alternatively, Ars is frequently really slanted and disingenuous to the point of dishonesty fairly often
Good, it is a start. And much better would be for those EU politicians, journalists and other people to move to Mastodon, Pixelfed, and similar independent platforms. That would make a much better example.
I can't understand why government offices for many countries are still on Twitter. At least Germany has their own mastodon service, but my home country Finland still uses Twitter.
I understand why everyone is one Twitter - because people and important people/orgs are there. What I don't understand is, why not also publish the posts on a Mastodon account. You don't have to engage there, but at least don't force people to use Twitter.
In Pakistan Twitter is banned (and blocked by ISPs) because Twitter won't ban the accounts of people/orgs the Pakistani State doesn't like. So, Twitter is not accessible in Pakistan without VPN (which are psuedo banned as well).
Yet, all the politicians (both government and non-government), media personalities, and many state run institutions actively run Twitter accounts. So it is one of the primary ways to understand what they are saying.
I don't have a problem with public bodies being on Twitter, but they should definitely be on somewhere else too. They need to be where the people are, and people are going other places.
In my experience it is the other way round. The reason people are on Twitter is because politicians are there. If they move the journalists and politically interested will quickly follow.
That's a pretty bad argument. For one the majority of people are on neither. For two, it's almost always about reading, and twitter doesn't let you read posts without an account.
No one is truly independent when it comes to politics. Everyone belongs to a political tribe, and if you don't, you are against whatever tribe you are currently engaging with.
I am not sure how that is a reaction to the grandparent, but we also don't fall into the same us-versus-them trap that divides the US. I think most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences:
- If you get sick, costs should be covered by universal health insurance.
- If you lose your job, there should be a safety net.
- When you retire, there should be a decent pension.
- Everybody should have access to good education.
- We don't want war.
- We don't want to be powerless against megacorps.
In other words, there is much more that is binding us than what is dividing us (in my country, pretty much every party from extreme left to populist right agrees on these things). For those things that we don't agree on, we should find compromises.
Those aren't that universally agreed upon (except war/megacorps/education) in working class/middle class. It's just that EU has high amount of people depending on those safety nets/pensions that any politician not for it is committing political suicide.
> most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences
Most in the US will, too. The nuances are where is falls apart, both in the US and in Europe.
- Should all costs be covered, for everything, no matter the cost? How would that work / How do we disband the laws of nature?
- How long should that net carry you? Does it only break the fall, or does it replace your job for eternity? Who pays for it? Do you have any obligations when losing your job?
- How high should that pension be? Who should pay for it? Should it (in part or in full) depend on you ever having worked? Can you choose when to retire?
- What is "good education", and what is "access"? I'm not all that bright, do I have a right to be taught at university? For how long? Who pays for it? Is anything expected in return?
- Are we pacifists who refuse to acknowledge that war might find us, even if we're not looking for it? Or are we preparing for war because we don't want it and believe that an aggressive imperial force will pounce unless it believe us to be capable of defending ourselves?
I don't believe that everyone in your country, much less in Europe, agrees. Once you remove the vague language and put concrete things in, you'll see people disagreeing on each point.
If it was that simple, we'll have peace on earth because everyone will be able to agree on those core things - as long as you promise them that it's their interpretation that counts.
I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
Now to everyone applauding those kind of things with a "the enemies of my enemies are my friends" logic:
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years HN will be inaccessible from the EU because it promotes non compliant and dangerous software. If you don't believe me, read the EU Cyber resilience act. It is slowly paving the way to this.
> I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
So everyone should leave, or the people with the mandate to protect EU should solve the issue with the platform in place of putting the responsibility in the users?
It's amazing more people don't understand this. In a free society people have the right to say things that are stupid, wrong, toxic and just plain false. If you live in a society where the government assumes the power to control what you are allowed to say you no longer live in a free society, period. This holds true whether you're talking about the EU's assault on free speech or the Trump administration's assault on free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. It's amazing so many are willing (and eager!) to surrender their freedoms to what they perceive as benevolent overlords with their best interest at heart. What they fail to understand is that once you have lost the ability to speak freely, you inevitably lose all of the other freedoms that go along with it. Your benevolent overlords now possess the power to arbitrarily classify anything they don't like (especially that which threatens their power) as "misinformation" or "dangerous speech" or whatever other euphemism they invent to silence you. Just because you may today happen to agree with the people who decide what you are allowed to say doesn't mean you will agree with them tomorrow. And tomorrow you won't be able to object, because your ability to speak freely will be gone.
I think you are confusing the right to say things with a right to not be subjected to consequences for what you say.
I think in US as in EU if you say something that is breaking a law you have to pay the consequence. The difference may be in EU having more laws and US less that are concerned with consequences.
> ” The Digital Services Act allows fines of up to 6 percent of a company's total worldwide annual turnover. EU regulators suggested last year that they could calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX.”
While it's nice to see EU hitting where it hurts, and $1bn is a lot of money by most scales, it isn't, insanely, that much to Musk. If I believe Google, his net worth is still over $300bn, so such fine would be less than 0.5% of his net worth.
Given his pattern of behaviour, he may well try to turn it all into a joke and be emboldened for more.
That said, I don't know how much cash Twitter and SpaceX have. Possibly not a lot. Tesla does have more, but it's publicly owned and much harder for Musk to raid for cash.
If such a law existed in the US, it wouldn't matter that you violated it, since it would be found invalid under the First Amendment. Does the EU not have any equivalent to protect freedom of speech from unjust laws?
Why? Companies are regulated all the time. Is deceptive advertising allowed in the US? Didn't think so.[1] Does that violate your First Amendment too?
This case is all about forbidding deceptive practices. Did Twitter's redefinition of blue checkmarks amount to deception? Maybe. There'll be a court case where Twitter get to make their case, if they lose them have to pay the fine. Lay off the pearl clutching.
The equivalent is in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Title II - Freedoms, Article 11). But I'm not sure why you think freedom of expression permits a business to publish things in a mis-leading manner?
That says "The exercise of these freedoms [...] may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law", which seems to basically be saying that laws can override freedom of speech in the EU.
Yes, of course. That's why when I buy some food I know that the list of ingredients is the actual list of ingredients and not someone's free expression. That helps me feel safer as a consumer. Same in this Twitter case. Does it really work differently in the US?
This would turn out very interestingly, because Elon Musk enjoys a level of access to the US executive branch that other companies only dream of. The fury and retribution from POTUS would be terrible, if the company of his close friend was fined by his mortal enemies
Problem solved. We now produce more oil than anyone else. Germany isn’t going to get there. They can’t make nuclear at the national level and they can’t do wind at the state level. Leaves solar in a country with less insolation than New England.
Germany/Europe are just the same kind of capitalist societies as anywhere else. If somebody is offering to sell you stuff for cheaper than another you most likely will buy unless other aspects override the advantage.
Germany enjoyed at least 10 years of cheap Gas. Politicians believed it would help Russia become integrated and dependent on the money flowing.
Putin was more crazy than we thought.
Which makes it so weird to watch Trump being so subservient to Putin.
Nothing wrong with buying the gas for cheaper. But when the guy literally invades, and they sat there with their thumbs up their bums, I think it isn’t that convincing that they’re “ready to fight”.
And yes, Trump is ruining America without a doubt.
With Musk upstaging Trump in White House interviews, you'd expect him to be ejected long time ago. Hence the existence of the leverage. Something on the level of helping Trump rig the election. That sort of leverage that would completely destroy Trump if it ever goes public.
Europe is full of oligarchs, and has less class mobility than the US. The history of Europe is a history of oligarchs throwing peasants at each other.
A middle-class lifestyle when one doesn't have to spend on the military might fool you into thinking that Europe is egalitarian (everybody looks healthy), and looking egalitarian can look like a lack of corruption if your glasses are dirty. Meanwhile, there are families that have been controlling that continent for hundreds of years.
The funny thing about the European rearmament bluff is that any weapons bought by Europe are eventually going to be aimed at other Europeans. It isn't that Europe needs to defend itself from the outside, it's that Europeans need to be protected from each other.
Mortal enemies? That's a bit dramatic. Whether Trump understands it or not, the EU is his ally and Russia his an example of an "enemy" (i.e. geopolitical competitor).
>> using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX.
So basicaly lets just use some stupid law that lets us randomly take into account all of the other property of a businessowner.
And then EU people wonder why no one wants to build companies in an environment like that...
… I mean pretty much everywhere does this sort of thing to some extent. If you don’t, then companies will just put all their risky/liability-attracting activity in a notionally-independent entity with no assets.
Authoritarianism is on the rise world wide. Liberalism (Democracy) is clearly on the decline.
Social media with private intelligence is the cause.
Social media is a private and state intelligence goldmine. Those with resources study what is said and craft messages to influence people's actions in real life. They then pay social media to promote these messages and then use all the data collected via rampant surveillance capitalism in order get feedback. That makes campaign successes measurable and therefore tunable. Penalties alone won't be enough to stop right wing or oligarchic movements in Europe or to protect western liberalism. A fine to an oligarch is only a declaration of war, not a meaningful check on power.
China set up the GFW because they realized that they could not subject illiterate subsistence farmer who have never left their home town to foreign interference, so they created a digital border. Yes, it also serves to put down dissent and that is bad, but it also keeps china more stable than it would be otherwise. Even Americans came around and voted to put the first brick in America's own great firewall by voting to ban TikTok. If the founders didn't bend to the current administration, then it would be banned right now for exactly the risk China saw when they implemented their own digital border.
It is not enough to fine when you have no border. Peter Thiel and his Palantir will actively work against European governments with the aid of X and Facebook by offering aid to those who can afford it with money or loyalty, which gives material power to those with selfish goals, who can use them to craft governments more amenable to their goals: Weak, divided, angry, gridlocked, and most importantly de-regulated.
Czechs vote guy who does NAZI salutes on the street, to european parliament, Slovaks voted guy who is lobbying for usage of russian oil and taking bribe of 1% of price of russian oil which slovak state company buys...
So we do not need more conspiracy theories about meddling, we need to address and deal with real things already toxic for community.
Yes as you guessed nothing in here has any relation to ExTwitter nor Youtube nor fakebook. /s
Worth nothing that russian gas is a lot cheaper than any alternative. Slovakia is not a rich country. It could be that people just want to pay less for their energy.
gas and oil pipelines from russia thru ukraine are slovak state property.
russian gas is cheaper is russian propagandist lie. or it is true but in sense that there are bribes prized in.
slovakia pays market price but percentage of that price is diverted to bank accounts in russia and turkey (or atleast was ,there is chatter that they moved some money to east asia because of sanctions) as a payment for slovak gov signing deal with russia until i think 2030 or 2035 or something like that. for example similar contract with ukraine was signed only for 10 years (i have no info about bribes in UA). and it ended last december...
russia is paying hungary and slovak governments to transport fossils, so governments do not have reason to do reverse adria flow, bring fossils from other pipelines etc etc.
( irony is that someone hacked czech premier Fialas ExTwitter account instead of Filip Turek nazi .... account )
as i understood it, LCOE for battery + renewables is on par with nuclear for years, and similar price of gas peaking... + EU is doing all sorts of programs to lower energy needs of buildings...
"funny" thing is that future chinese battery manufacturing capacity IN EUROPE will displace russian gas in long term...
> russian gas is cheaper is russian propagandist lie.
That's not true. It is cheaper. Logically it makes absolute sense, as it is cheaper to transport through a pipeline than tankers and there is no other pipeline in Europe that can cover what russia used to provide. That's why countries that import Russian gas have significantly cheaper household natural gas prices [1].
I'm not going to get into the bribe tangent. As long as russian gas is cheaper, that will be the biggest reason to buy it IMO.
Switching energy source takes years and huge investment. The big problem is that a lot of households rely on natural natural gas for heating, and a lot of them can't afford to switch.
He spent an outrageous amount to buy his own platform just to boost tweets that ironically highlight how making - or losing - money doesn’t reflect talent in anything else.
There are a compilation of these salutes of top Democrats doing similar gestures. Has there been anything more by Elon on this front in addition to moving his arm (accidentally) in a specific angle?
Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him, it might drive a wedge between him and Trump and it also pushes him into an obvious conflict of interest. The US started treating everyone else like an adversary, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the favor is being returned.
> Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him
US senators are threatening to withdraw the US from NATO if the EU pushes through with this obvious lawfare.
The thing is, though, minihands’ approach to NATO is such that, a few months in, Poland is talking to France about hosting nuclear warheads. Like “oh, we might withdraw from NATO” is not quite the threat it might have been a few years ago; it’s already somewhat questionable what use NATO is anymore.
Can’t tariff Germany’s factory- how would you even go about legislating that?
The way to go about it so to start mandating that all cars have rain sensors, or dashboard instruments or HUD, or radar if they do TACC or parking sensors - things that most other cars have, but would be a pain for Tesla to add back in for just one region
Interesting news given the recently announced US trade war vs the entire world, with special treatment for rivals like the EU and China.
It seems the EU have decided the most effective response to an oligarchy declaring trade war is to target the leading oligarchs with government influence. Expect more actions which enrage Trump and Musk and an escalation from both sides. This won’t end well for either side IMO.
Until three months ago we were also strong allies. But there has been nothing but contempt from the current administration towards the EU and Europe.
That said, the EU usually prepares these cases very meticulously. As the article says, they already started in 2023 and issued a preliminary ruling last year. Also, it seems like the issue can still be settled without a fine:
The European Union and X could still reach a settlement if the company agrees to changes that satisfy regulators’ concerns, the officials said.
That said, it's likely that there have been many deliberations about this and other fines (e.g. Apple) and there were rumors that the EU was going to play softer to appease Trump. But I guess Vance's speech at the NATO conference, the disdain for Europe in the leaked Signal chats (which was completely misplaced because Houthis are attacking vessels as a revenge for Israel's attack on Palestine), and then the high tariffs on EU exports (where Trump only takes into account goods and not services) made the EU decide to show teeth instead.
IMO in the end it's the best thing to do, worst thing is to appear weak with these bullies (apparently Trump called Jean-Claude Juncker 'a brutal killer').
But it does make sense: both Musk and Trump are emotionally unstable morons with gigantic egos, their cooperation is doomed to fall apart the moment they have a difference of opinions on something (which just happened, with Musk criticizing tariffs on EU).
Going after Trump-world oligarchs, if that is what’s happening here, is arguably a more viable approach for the EU than the straight-up tariff-mirroring one China is taking.
I mean, given the baseline that the EU _has_ to retaliate (IMO the game theory of trade wars dictates this; the EU really can't _not_ retaliate), targeted retaliation against Trump's people, and potentially targeted retaliation against Trump-voting regions (the EU did this in Trump's first attempt at tariff increases a few years back), is likely less damaging than China's approach for the EU (though certainly also lacking in the same degree of shock and awe).
Baiting Musk into some 3AM rage tweets might be a smart move. It would subtly align the anti-Musk forces among Democrats and within the GOP with Europe.
Musk is already (frequently) raging against EU — the topics include freedom of speech and immigration… and calling the foreign minister of Poland “a little man”.
There is a reason the Tesla brand is suffering in Europe.
> and calling the foreign minister of Poland “a little man”.
Just for context, which I think is important here: The foreign minister said Poland is paying for Starlink for Ukraine ($50m/year) and that they will be forced to look at other suppliers if they prove to be unreliable.
Elon responded back claiming that $50m is a small fraction of the cost, there's no substitute and said "Be quiet, little man".
> the topics include freedom of speech and immigration
Most of EU citizens are pro freedom of speech and anti immigration btw.
> Most of EU citizens are pro freedom of speech and anti immigration btw.
Yes, this is clearly true. It also is clearly true that many if not most of EU political parties see freedom of speech as an obstacle and for some unclear reason are reticent to act on their (potential) voter's mandate to radically limit immigration, especially 'culturally incompatible' immigration. They still seem to consider being 'called racist' a threat even though the term 'racist' has lost most of its meaning - when everyone and his dog is a racist it is hardly surprising to be called one.
The EU has a long way to go before it can be considered a paragon of democracy. The commission is not democratically elected, the parliament is but has only limited power. To me - living in Sweden, being a Dutch native - the EU looks like the result of a metastasised bureaucratic infection of the former EEC (the European Economic Community) and I'd much prefer for the moloch of Brussels to be brought to heel and reduced to its former size and glory. That means a much smaller size and a larger glory since a group of countries which voluntarily cooperate economically while retaining their sovereignty is a better model than the current one which mostly seems to be designed to provide hooks for lobbyists and opportunities for grift while providing endless cushy 'jobs' for those who are willing to swallow their integrity.
and he also wants the US to withdraw from NATO, which means directly and concretely increasing the risk of war in Europe. Unpopular measure in Europe obviously.
Screwing with Apple is one thing, but trying to "make an example" out of a company with strong ties to the current administration won't end well for them.
Are we really saying the government of Europe should be afraid of a foreign business? That honestly sounds like even more reason they should be fighting to regulate.
Iphones are/will be hundreds of dollars costlier because of tarrifs, so 1 billion is nothing to anybody... Also DOGE should make payment for that 1 billion faster executed if they really are about efficiency XD
If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US. Just read that bullshit quote about what a blue checkbox on a profile means or not means...
>If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US.
What makes you believe that? The current US administration doesn't care about laws in their own country, why would they care about laws in other countries?
> If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US
This is the retaliation. We made the first moves. The White House’s contempt for Europe has been laid bare—trying not to anger Trump, at this point, would be superfluous.
When you say the White House’s contempt do you mean when they decided to stop spending money on Ukraine or…?
I’m European and I couldn’t care less about blue checkmarks and I don’t want social networks censoring people. After all, every time the commission has publicly clashed with Musk it has been because the commission wanted more censorship and Musk doesn’t care. On what side should I be?
Are there any independent studies that have confirmed this? I don't think such a study would still be possible given the API access limitations.
We know that Twitter used to comply with far fewer government censorship requests in countries like Turkey and India before Musk took over, so actual data would be great.
I am talking in regards to censorship by the platform, not from the government/legally required.
It is a personal observation, but one I think it's clearly observeable by anyone that looks at them. I don't need a study to tell me that Tokyo is cleaner than SF, or that 4chan has less censorship than reddit.
I appreciate you asking, but I've had these discussions before, and they've never turned out to be fruitful. At this point I'm only interested in (and going to change my mind if presented with) independent studies, but since those are no longer possible, I don't think this will happen.
Why make my initial comment? I keep seeing this assertion in discussions around Twitter, but I've never seen it substantiated beyond personal anecdotes, and it runs counter to my own observations. It's possible that I'm wrong, so I like to ask for data backing up these assertions.
Or are you asking why I made my last comment? I thought it was more polite than just not replying.
> When you say the White House’s contempt do you mean
I mean the attitude shown in Signalgate. Europe is seen as a competitor to American power. (Also, like, threatening to invade an EU member’s territory.)
They should do 100B - what’re they gonna do? Same for the rest of American big tech. Sue ‘em all, 5B a year. Just pass a law naming them specifically for a special tax.
https://archive.ph/y7Yah
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.
That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.
Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
Even under previous Twitter management, there were a lot of verified accounts who weren't celebrities by any reasonable definition. So only a moron would have ever believed that "blue checkmark = celebrity". We can't protect morons from themselves and it's pointless to even try.
Calling people stupid is a common and low-quality excuse to not regulate. It's part of how societies start to fail. If some percentage of people are mistaken about something, the reality of that is all that matters, regardless of how stupid you personally think those people are.
Nah. There's no evidence to support your claim. You're just making things up to try to find a plausible, friendly sounding excuse to justify government censorship. Citation needed.
Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Government regulation can never change that reality.
>government censorship
If I trick someone I get a fine, if a multi billion company do that is censorship?
The multi billion company hasn't tricked anyone here so your comment makes no sense.
> Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
The European Union thinks that it is an actual problem though, one that governments or media companies need to fix.
Whoa, there's nothing trivial about ten thousand mechanical turks wishing each other good morning on a loop bub
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
To be fair, US free speech laws have never grappled with as concentrated publishing/social ownership as we have now.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
That quote is not from the article?
And in any case, the fine does not seem to be about the blue checkmarks at all.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
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If I'd hear this language coming out of my politicians' mouths, I'd really start to wonder if I'd always belong to their "we"...
>And we'll, wen can craft the law any way we like. We could even call it Twitter law.
You don't think crafting (in effect) bill of attainder is a bad idea?
<cough>TikTok</cough> and unlike that corrupt old world Europe, we have specific language in our constitution against bills of attainder.
The reason Europe is attacking X is to suppress European speech. Why be proud of that to the point of sneering?
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Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
The DSA violation was news in 2024
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/eu-says-elon-mus...
And the EU is right. Elons blue check boosting logic absolutely violated those laws. Other companies played by the rules and made their systems DSA compliant. Elon did not, now he needs to pay.
Am I misremembering history?
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said
I thought the blue check mark always indicated that account name on Twitter matched the person behind the account. That’s it. They eventually expanded that to include non-famous people.
Kyrie Irving (an NBA player known for conspiracies like flat earthism) had a blue check - no one would ever mistake him for a trustworthy source of information.
The only thing blue checkmark meant was that you knew somebody at twitter
I am not familiar with the DSA.
1. Are companies permitted to charge for badges under DSA?
2. Is there an example of another social media that EU officials have identified as being compliant with DSA?
You can read the text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng
If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.
Article 25, clause 1:
> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.
These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.
They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.
I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
>They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
It also means enterprising prosecutors and regulators can use it as a cudgel against their opponents. As others have mentioned, the checkmark already meant very little when it came to whether the poster was trustworthy or not. It's like fining Chrome and Firefox for accepting letsencrypt certificates, because previously there was a $10 cost to having a lock appear on your site, and letsencrypt making it free misleads users.
It's the age old argument of "letter of the law" vs "spirit of the law".
Neither approach is perfect. Personally I prefer the spirit approach as companies will generally do more harm than regulators given some rope.
It does. I don't think this example is as good as you think, though. You used to have to give out your full legal name and address and have them verified to get an SSL certificate and the lock icon. When any random website could get the lock icon, this did indeed lead to more people typing their passwords into phishing sites, thinking they were real because they had the lock icon, and this was indeed a real problem.
They could have chosen to only show the lock for EV certificates, and show something else, or no icon, for DV certificates, but instead they made a choice that was misleading. Google probably should have been fined for that, but not very much, because it wasn't foreseen. I think Mozilla was still a non-profit at the time.
The DSA ruling was wrong. The blue checkmark never indicated trustworthy sources of information. Even under previous Twitter management, verified accounts routinely posted misinformation and disinformation. Thierry Breton is either an idiot or lying to push a political narrative.
The trustworthy information that blue check marks indicated was not that the /contents of the message/ were objectively trustworthy, but that /a specific person was willing to be associated with the contents of the message/. That’s what was lost.
Are you saying you think the semantics of that is anywhere near worth a billion dollar fine? When the changes were clearly communicated, and reported on by the press!
In that case, what about the CSAM problem on the Meta-owned platforms? How many billions should that be?
> Are you saying you think the semantics of that is anywhere near worth a billion dollar fine?
Did you reply to the correct post? My post was about what trustworthy information was removed, not about my assessment of worth or interpretation of a law in a nation where I’m not a citizen or a lawyer…
That's right.
This is not about the blue check marks at all. It's about X not censoring information to the EU's tastes, and them finding something... anything, to punish Elon for it.
The process for this began before the inauguration right?
Don't know... Elon was a target before the inauguration anyhow.
> Thierry Breton is either an idiot or lying to push a political narrative.
But then again this has always been true.
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> Unlike Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, which are publicly traded, X is owned solely by Mr. Musk. EU regulators are considering using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX. That increases the potential penalty to well over $1 billion, one person said.
Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
Neither NYT nor the EU is wrong. Elon's companies are, to him, fungible, with employees able to be used in any company, like when Elon borrowed engineers employed at Tesla and SpaceX to work on Twitter when he bought it. These are all separate companies on paper, but Elon treats the workers as interchangeable. He acts as if they are all owned by him, so the EU is treating them as he treats them.
And not just the workers, Elon threatened to take all of Tesla's AI stack to xAI if they didn't give him the 55B pay package.
Most countries' company law has a clause that says if you violate company boundaries like this, they're effectively one company. Otherwise you could use this sort of thing to limit your liability well in excess of intended (the primary purpose of company law is to establish carve-outs in which you can perform business with limited liability).
That’s a good explanation of how Elon is also wrong, I guess, but the NYT or EU is still wrong too.
If the other shareholder are ok with this behavior, than there's nothing wrong with it.
If they complain, it's a very serious crime, he's basically stealing, but if they are don't, than it's not.
While others certainly have a financial interest in it, it is not publicly traded and Musk solely controls it. For instance, he just unilaterally sold it to another of his privately held companies, xAI, for a valuation he made up.
Musk's privately held companies, and to a large degree Tesla as well, are all things he treats as effectively one big company that he controls; he'll take employees from one to another at will, he sells them to each other or spins them out at will in all stock transactions, etc.
The EU regulations allow seeing through such sham company boundaries that are all controlled by a single entity, and treating them as a single company.
How do you know that the shareholders of X did not have a voice in acquisition by xAI?
In this article: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
"Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that the two companies had been collaborating closely and the deal would drive deeper integration with Grok, the investor said."
Now, he may have only been talking about xAI investors here, but it seems pretty clear from his actions that Musk pretty much demands full control of his companies, and if he does involve the other investor's they're likely rubber-stamping without much opportunity to push back.
huh, didnt know, thats pretty crazy
> It's private but it's not "solely owned"
You’re right. Controlled would be correct, as it invokes the legal concept of common control. (No idea if it’s a thing in the EU.)
> Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
Call it by its name. It’s lawfare.
The EU is trying to coerce X to limit freedom of speech for everyone worldwide, including Americans.
Talk about a nice NATO ally eh, trying to lawfare your constitutionally granted freedoms away?
It is much more likely that the NYT journalist misunderstood something. The question is what.
I guess at some point the EU has to do something if they want companies to keep implementing these regulations under the calculus of “cost of implementation vs. cost of fines that arise from non-compliance”.
I would love to believe that some companies would follow these regulations even without severe threat, because they’re the right thing to do for users, but I know in a lot of cases it can take significant time, effort, and money to keep up with every regulation coming out of the EU
Companies don't really care about "the right thing to do for users."
They care about maximizing profits from you.
If you're hoping companies are going to "do the right thing for you" on their own, you're probably going to be disappointed.
Once upon a time these companies valued their user base, afraid they would leave and find another way to use their time. I guess they’ve got the data that their users are all addicted and will never do that. At least until they push too hard.
Unfair business practices and quasi monopolies (Microsoft), waled gardens (apple), and in the past 15 years advanced data analysis let's those companies exactly calculate how far they can make their users "suffer/bleed/annoy" and stop just right before the breaking point.
Also, if real competition arises, it's just bought and merged (Facebook buying instagram) since anti-trust laws have not been properly applied, especially in the digital sector.
And then the breaking point becomes the new normal, and the new breaking point becomes farther away.
Microsoft keeps deleting ways to install Windows without signing up for a Microsoft account.
Twice in my life I've created a Microsoft account to do something that required a Microsoft account, and then a few days later they demanded my phone number. Because they know perfectly well that if you demand a phone number during signup, it deters more people from signing up, but if you demand it after they've already started using their account, they're less likely to be willing to throw away the account. I was, though.
For some reason they haven't yet done that with my Minecraft-migrated account. Or did they? Maybe I entered my phone number there and forgot I did so.
It's really tough to apply anti-trust law to companies that aren't selling commodities. What would or wouldn't count as a competitor to Instagram? Since it's free for end users, the customers are mostly advertisers. And they have a zillion other channels to get their message out. Meta hardly has anything approaching a monopoly for either advertisers or consumers. Consumers frequently post pictures on X, LinkedIn, Google Photos, Strava, Snapchat, etc.
> It's really tough to apply anti-trust law to companies that aren't selling commodities.
The EU, rather famously, managed with Microsoft. It's mostly the US that's beholden to large corporations over people, rather than it being an intractible problem.
> Meta hardly has anything approaching a monopoly for either advertisers or consumers
Meta does not command the lions share of the time spent on social media, but claiming >20% of revenue is oligopoly territory [0,1]
> Consumers frequently post pictures on X, LinkedIn, Google Photos, Strava, Snapchat
Do you really belive LinkedIn and Google Photos compete with SnapChat and Facebook for "Sharing photos with friends on social media"? If so, you might as well throw Flikr and Imgur on your list, though I wouldn't count them in the same market either.
[0] https://www.emarketer.com/content/meta-s-ad-revenue-share-va...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/242549/digital-ad-market...
When there's a significant opportunity for growth in userbase, corporate social media is good to users. Once that plateaus, they look to grow something else, usually advertising revenue.
The current incentive structure rewards growth more than a stable profitable state, which I think is a mistake.
that's because of the network effect: while you're a small part of people's network, you can be replaced easily. once you've connected 60-90% of their network (including the sort of people they follow online, not necessary people they meet in meatspace), you don't need to worry too much about getting replaced.
> Once upon a time these companies valued their user base
Because that's what was bringing profit then. We should never forget, that's the whole point of capitalism: companies maximize profit. Companies are not human beings with emotions, they are profit-maximizing entities.
They evolve in a framework set by regulations. The society, made of human beings with emotions, is supposed to define that framework in such a way that what makes companies profitable is also good for the people.
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Censorship is not the “right thing to do” though. Just look at how it’s been abused in recent years.
Indeed. I'm European and I also see the EU's "banning of disinformation" as a form of censorship in gift wrapping. What about the government disinformation during covid? Did they punish anyone for that?
Vague and ambiguous laws like these against disinformation enable selective enforcement for the governments to make sure their PoVs go though the media and everything they deem inappropriate or a threat to their authority gets shut down.
Those in power in Brussels are afraid of communication channels they can't control as people become more and more dissatisfied and irate with their leaders, policies and QoL reductions, so they push laws like these plus the ones trying to backdoor encrypted communications in order to gain control over the narrative, monitor and crush any potential uprisings before they even occur.
I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation. The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked. Maybe even better public education could work, and then they wouldn't need to censor it because nobody would believe it anyway?
>I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation.
There is no silver bullet solution since we're not in an utopia. On the one hand all private media is controlled by biased oligarchs each with their own interests. On the other hand, governments in power want to control the narrative towards their own interests hence why in many EU countries we have state media. This is how it's always been and how it's always gonna be, a constant tug of war between interest groups, but I don't want any one side to have complete control of the media as that would be even worse.
>The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked.
Why do you think it hasn't worked? To me it seems like it's working, that's why those in power fear it and want to control it all for themselves.
My parents lived under communism. The speech control the EU is pushing resembles very well what communism had but with a better PR spin on it. Communism got defeated in part by total freedom of speech winning in the free market place of ideas versus government controlled speech. The Arab Spring revolutions could not have happened without the free media circulating on the internet. So to see the EU trying to lock down on free speech the same way totalitarian regime did, is incredibly suspicious to me like their afraid of their own people revolting against them.
I don't want unelected elites in Brussels deciding for me what content and opinions I should be allowed to view. If you want to win in the free marketplace of ideas, then come up with arguments for the people on why you consider each piece of information to be misinformation and debate it in public, not just ban it outright.
The free marketplace idea obviously has not worked to combat disinformation, because we're trying the radical free marketplace idea and so many people are believing so much disinformation that they're threatening to destroy every western country. One of them is already destroying itself, not just threatening to.
>many people are believing so much disinformation
That is a symptom, not a cause. That means education system is bad and has failed people, OR, that people are so desperate with their living standards that they're not disinformed but they just want to take revenge on the establishment that has failed them by voting extremes.
Either way, those are symptoms, not the cause so I don't believe government enforced censorship is the solution because that's exactly what totalitarian regimes did when people were unhappy. The solution is for the establishment to accept they have failed the people and start to do good for the people or step down.
This means the democratic system IS working as intended, as if you were to censor speech and take away peoples' only legal way of protesting (voting), then their next alternatives is violence and uprising.
> That means education system is bad and has failed people
What if the education system can't fix this? Not just the current one - any education system.
> that people are so desperate with their living standards
What if people's propensity to believe utter bullshit is independent of their financial situation?
> Either way, those are symptoms, not the cause
What if the tendency to believe bullshit is the cause? You have failed to prove it isn't, so your proposed solutions probably won't work and indeed may make matters much worse.
>What if the education system can't fix this?
If your nation's education is so bad that 51% of the population buys into disinformation with no way of convincing them otherwise, then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate. Might as well give up on democracy and anoint an emperor or king to rule over you, because there's no point in cosplaying as a democracy if you're not planning to respect the will of the majority at the elections.
>Not just the current one - any education system.
Switzerland and nordic countries like Denmark seem to be quite well educated, highly transparent, low corruption and a decent democracy. So it is possible.
>What if people's propensity to believe utter bullshit is independent of their financial situation?
People's political biases are ALWAYS tied to their wealth, education and social class. Just compare a map with wealth/income distribution with a map with blue/red voters.
>What if the tendency to believe bullshit is the cause?
Look in the mirror.
> then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate.
Or, you know, you try to limit the spreading of disinfo, simply to protect the weak. We could for example have a talk about how the people most prone to fall for disinfo are the old and farthest removed from the reach of the education system.
> if you're not planning to respect the will of the majority
You are the one who is not respecting the will of the majority. The government is formed by majority coalition coming from the elections, and the government is doing this. The will of the majority is respected by fighting the disinformation.
> Switzerland and nordic countries seem to be quite well educated and a decent democracy. So it is possible.
Nordic countries are part of the EU and on board with these policies, so no idea what are you on about here.
> People's political biases are always tied to their wealth and social class. Just compare a map with wealth/income distribution with a map with blue/red voter.
It would be nice if you tried to engage with what I wrote and not something completely different.
Ah yes.
> If your nation's education is so bad that 51% of the population buys into disinformation with no way of convincing them otherwise, then you'll have to accept you're doomed as a country and deserve that fate. Might as well give up on democracy
Since giving up on democracy in this situation is a good thing, according to you, will you finally stop complaining about it?
You still didn't tell me what you think should be done about it. I understand from your vague gestures that the answer is "nothing", perhaps because you enjoy the fact that developed world powers are crumbling to dust. There are reasonable reasons one might hold that position, but if that is in fact your position, you should acknowledge it.
> I don't believe [X] is the solution because that's exactly what totalitarian regimes did
Hitler also ate sugar. Ban sugar!
> The solution is for the establishment to accept they have failed the people and start to do good for the people or step down.
This contradicts your stated position, because preventing disinformation is good for the people, but you don't think the establishment should do it.
> This means the democratic system IS working as intended, as if you were to censor speech and take away peoples' only legal way of protesting (voting)
Very obvious non-sequitur. What do penalties against the app formerly known as Twitter have to do with taking away voting rights?
This comment is not in good faith so I won't entertain it further.
lol, your comment reads as: "This comment asks me to suggest a fix, and I don't have one, so I will pretend that the other poster isn't worth responding to for unrelated reasons."
I remember the communism. Boy, you have no idea. And, frankly, your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive.
>Boy, you have no idea.
Why? What did I miss?
>your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive
That's how boiling the frog works. Where do you think you'll end up if you give the government authority to decide what information is right or wrong for you to have access to?
What happens when Ursula v.d Leyen decides that her scandal involving the deleted email is "disinformation" and has a friendly judge call for it to be scrubbed from media and search engines?
You can't and should never blindly trust governments with them having your well being at heart. The main goal of a government is to stay in power, by any mean necessary in order to help those who finance their careers and campaigns.
If you can't see the slope between this speech police path and becoming an USSR-Light minus the gulags and executions, then maybe you're the offensive one.
> That's how boiling the frog works.
that's also how the slippery slope fallacy works
Technically, "slippery slope" isn't a fallacy. It's just a name for the idea that one thing leads inevitably to another. It's not fallacious to extrapolate from past experience, even if that extrapolation turns out to be wrong.
I wrote "slippery slope fallacy", not just "slippery slope", for a reason.
Arguing A->B is only a fallacy if no argument for the sequence is provided. A plausible argument was provided here based on prior experience of other governments. There's no fallacy if you just disagree on the probability.
No argument (not plausible, not probable, none) for the sequence was provided.
Communist revolution always precedes communist control of speech.
Hitler seizing power and the Nazis invading Poland was also a fallacy. Until it wasn't. The NSA spying on everyone was also a fallacy. Until it wasn't. Go back in time and find other examples.
Any extreme powers you give the government to "keep you safe", they will eventually be abused, first against foreigners, political dissidents and whistleblowers, then against you.
History doesn't necessarily repat itself, but it definitely rhymes.
Your comment is disinformation. This is not a problem that needs to be fixed. There is no need for governments to force private companies to act as censors. The free marketplace of ideas is working better than ever.
If you're unhappy with the current situation then do something positive by working to improve critical thinking education in your own country's schools.
EU isn't the only entity with regulations and interests. Which creates a lot of conflicts. Like free speech is limited in EU and less so in USA. Should company in USA implement EU restrictions on USA users? What if both EU and USA users are in the same chat. EU is going to go after Mask's other companies. In other words EU plays dirty as usual, just like with Russian's money. Same story with Telegram. At some point it will backfire.
That's also been the issue for decades with the financial industry: the fines and probability of getting caught are far less (and already 'priced' in) vs the big profits.
And if the shit really hits the fan, they know that the government is going to pay to rescue them with taxpayer money (just one example: financial crisis of 2008).
To the mods: Why was my link to arstechnica hijacked and transformed into a link to the NYTimes? This is creepy.
I’m guessing this is the article you submitted: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/eu-may-make-an-e...
This is the first sentence in it, which links to the New York Times article the submission was changed to:
> European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
These are the Hacker News guidelines (you’ve been on here for 18 years, perhaps time to give them a read): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
This isn’t creepy, this is in line with the rules.
This is a valid question -- any response from mods?
There is another comment that answers "why" I assume dang doesn't have the time to answer all of these individually. But tl;dr it's in the guidelines for posting on the site why this happened.
Especially since NYT is paywalled and Ars is not.
https://archive.ph/y7Yah
if i had to guess: NYT was the original source of the news and Ars is just reporting on NYT reporting. Or alternatively, Ars is frequently really slanted and disingenuous to the point of dishonesty fairly often
Good, it is a start. And much better would be for those EU politicians, journalists and other people to move to Mastodon, Pixelfed, and similar independent platforms. That would make a much better example.
I can't understand why government offices for many countries are still on Twitter. At least Germany has their own mastodon service, but my home country Finland still uses Twitter.
I understand why everyone is one Twitter - because people and important people/orgs are there. What I don't understand is, why not also publish the posts on a Mastodon account. You don't have to engage there, but at least don't force people to use Twitter.
> I understand why everyone is one Twitter
False premise, most people are not on Twitter. Outside of Japan and the US, comparatively few people use Twitter.
In Pakistan Twitter is banned (and blocked by ISPs) because Twitter won't ban the accounts of people/orgs the Pakistani State doesn't like. So, Twitter is not accessible in Pakistan without VPN (which are psuedo banned as well).
Yet, all the politicians (both government and non-government), media personalities, and many state run institutions actively run Twitter accounts. So it is one of the primary ways to understand what they are saying.
I don't have a problem with public bodies being on Twitter, but they should definitely be on somewhere else too. They need to be where the people are, and people are going other places.
Because most ordinary people are on Twitter and not Mastodon
Ordinary people are on neither. The group which is on Twitter are politicians and they can decide to move to Mastodon if they want.
Most ordinary people are on neither
I guess that depends on location but I’ll refine my statement to say ordinary people are overwhelmingly more likely to be on Twitter than Mastodon.
That's circular, though: the more services become available elsewhere, the easier it is for people to switch.
People don’t move to places without ordinary people for “services”. That’s not how social networks work.
In my experience it is the other way round. The reason people are on Twitter is because politicians are there. If they move the journalists and politically interested will quickly follow.
Ordinary people follow politicians on social media?
Truth social pretty much proves that's the case.
That's a pretty bad argument. For one the majority of people are on neither. For two, it's almost always about reading, and twitter doesn't let you read posts without an account.
Twitter was never really big in most European countries. I only have an account to follow AI hype and drama.
That maybe true for Meta services but Twitter was never really a thing in EU.
No one is truly independent when it comes to politics. Everyone belongs to a political tribe, and if you don't, you are against whatever tribe you are currently engaging with.
I am not sure how that is a reaction to the grandparent, but we also don't fall into the same us-versus-them trap that divides the US. I think most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences:
- If you get sick, costs should be covered by universal health insurance.
- If you lose your job, there should be a safety net.
- When you retire, there should be a decent pension.
- Everybody should have access to good education.
- We don't want war.
- We don't want to be powerless against megacorps.
In other words, there is much more that is binding us than what is dividing us (in my country, pretty much every party from extreme left to populist right agrees on these things). For those things that we don't agree on, we should find compromises.
Those aren't that universally agreed upon (except war/megacorps/education) in working class/middle class. It's just that EU has high amount of people depending on those safety nets/pensions that any politician not for it is committing political suicide.
> most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences
Most in the US will, too. The nuances are where is falls apart, both in the US and in Europe.
- Should all costs be covered, for everything, no matter the cost? How would that work / How do we disband the laws of nature?
- How long should that net carry you? Does it only break the fall, or does it replace your job for eternity? Who pays for it? Do you have any obligations when losing your job?
- How high should that pension be? Who should pay for it? Should it (in part or in full) depend on you ever having worked? Can you choose when to retire?
- What is "good education", and what is "access"? I'm not all that bright, do I have a right to be taught at university? For how long? Who pays for it? Is anything expected in return?
- Are we pacifists who refuse to acknowledge that war might find us, even if we're not looking for it? Or are we preparing for war because we don't want it and believe that an aggressive imperial force will pounce unless it believe us to be capable of defending ourselves?
I don't believe that everyone in your country, much less in Europe, agrees. Once you remove the vague language and put concrete things in, you'll see people disagreeing on each point.
If it was that simple, we'll have peace on earth because everyone will be able to agree on those core things - as long as you promise them that it's their interpretation that counts.
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I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
Now to everyone applauding those kind of things with a "the enemies of my enemies are my friends" logic:
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years HN will be inaccessible from the EU because it promotes non compliant and dangerous software. If you don't believe me, read the EU Cyber resilience act. It is slowly paving the way to this.
HN is already blocked in China.
> I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
So everyone should leave, or the people with the mandate to protect EU should solve the issue with the platform in place of putting the responsibility in the users?
It's amazing more people don't understand this. In a free society people have the right to say things that are stupid, wrong, toxic and just plain false. If you live in a society where the government assumes the power to control what you are allowed to say you no longer live in a free society, period. This holds true whether you're talking about the EU's assault on free speech or the Trump administration's assault on free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. It's amazing so many are willing (and eager!) to surrender their freedoms to what they perceive as benevolent overlords with their best interest at heart. What they fail to understand is that once you have lost the ability to speak freely, you inevitably lose all of the other freedoms that go along with it. Your benevolent overlords now possess the power to arbitrarily classify anything they don't like (especially that which threatens their power) as "misinformation" or "dangerous speech" or whatever other euphemism they invent to silence you. Just because you may today happen to agree with the people who decide what you are allowed to say doesn't mean you will agree with them tomorrow. And tomorrow you won't be able to object, because your ability to speak freely will be gone.
I think you are confusing the right to say things with a right to not be subjected to consequences for what you say.
I think in US as in EU if you say something that is breaking a law you have to pay the consequence. The difference may be in EU having more laws and US less that are concerned with consequences.
And it's these laws that seep into the area of free speech.
This was the particularly notable part:
> ” The Digital Services Act allows fines of up to 6 percent of a company's total worldwide annual turnover. EU regulators suggested last year that they could calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX.”
It would be interesting to see SpaceX retaliate against the EU, such as by charging a fee for all EU launches to cover the EU's lawfare.
SpaceX (and Elon) likes government funding, not tariffs.
While it's nice to see EU hitting where it hurts, and $1bn is a lot of money by most scales, it isn't, insanely, that much to Musk. If I believe Google, his net worth is still over $300bn, so such fine would be less than 0.5% of his net worth.
Given his pattern of behaviour, he may well try to turn it all into a joke and be emboldened for more.
That said, I don't know how much cash Twitter and SpaceX have. Possibly not a lot. Tesla does have more, but it's publicly owned and much harder for Musk to raid for cash.
If such a law existed in the US, it wouldn't matter that you violated it, since it would be found invalid under the First Amendment. Does the EU not have any equivalent to protect freedom of speech from unjust laws?
It's EU. Our favourite pasttime is to regulate.
Why? Companies are regulated all the time. Is deceptive advertising allowed in the US? Didn't think so.[1] Does that violate your First Amendment too?
This case is all about forbidding deceptive practices. Did Twitter's redefinition of blue checkmarks amount to deception? Maybe. There'll be a court case where Twitter get to make their case, if they lose them have to pay the fine. Lay off the pearl clutching.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/54
Aren't libel laws such laws?
No, because the US has those, and X isn't violating them.
The equivalent is in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Title II - Freedoms, Article 11). But I'm not sure why you think freedom of expression permits a business to publish things in a mis-leading manner?
That says "The exercise of these freedoms [...] may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law", which seems to basically be saying that laws can override freedom of speech in the EU.
Yes, of course. That's why when I buy some food I know that the list of ingredients is the actual list of ingredients and not someone's free expression. That helps me feel safer as a consumer. Same in this Twitter case. Does it really work differently in the US?
This would turn out very interestingly, because Elon Musk enjoys a level of access to the US executive branch that other companies only dream of. The fury and retribution from POTUS would be terrible, if the company of his close friend was fined by his mortal enemies
Yeah, if they’re not careful, he might slap them with tariffs and threaten to take some of their territory.
We're ready for a fight.
No we're not. Our military and our economy is a shadow of US.
We could be ready to fight if we got rid of dumb politicians and endless bureaucracy, but in current state without US we are nothing.
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> An actual fight showed up at their doorstep and they were too addicted to their fossil fuels
As an American that doesn't sound too unfamiliar to me either. Remember "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq?
Problem solved. We now produce more oil than anyone else. Germany isn’t going to get there. They can’t make nuclear at the national level and they can’t do wind at the state level. Leaves solar in a country with less insolation than New England.
Germany/Europe are just the same kind of capitalist societies as anywhere else. If somebody is offering to sell you stuff for cheaper than another you most likely will buy unless other aspects override the advantage.
Germany enjoyed at least 10 years of cheap Gas. Politicians believed it would help Russia become integrated and dependent on the money flowing.
Putin was more crazy than we thought.
Which makes it so weird to watch Trump being so subservient to Putin.
Nothing wrong with buying the gas for cheaper. But when the guy literally invades, and they sat there with their thumbs up their bums, I think it isn’t that convincing that they’re “ready to fight”.
And yes, Trump is ruining America without a doubt.
Nah Putin is exactly the guy we’ve been saying he was for literally decades. Wishful thinking from Merkel is not an excuse.
Spreading Russian conspiracy theories now?
That's cute.
Musk is not Trump's "close friend". He is someone who holds him by the balls with some iron-clad leverage.
> He is someone who holds him by the balls with some iron-clad leverage
What leverage? Musk is a useful, rich idiot who is serving as a heat shield and distraction while the GOP blows out our deficit.
Trump doesn’t strike me as loyal to anyone. Including Musk, he could just stop taking his calls one day and he would just be fine.
With Musk upstaging Trump in White House interviews, you'd expect him to be ejected long time ago. Hence the existence of the leverage. Something on the level of helping Trump rig the election. That sort of leverage that would completely destroy Trump if it ever goes public.
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> Elon Musk enjoys a level of access to the US executive branch that other companies only dream of
In short, he's an oligarch. Over here we don't react kindly to that level of political corruption.
Europe is full of oligarchs, and has less class mobility than the US. The history of Europe is a history of oligarchs throwing peasants at each other.
A middle-class lifestyle when one doesn't have to spend on the military might fool you into thinking that Europe is egalitarian (everybody looks healthy), and looking egalitarian can look like a lack of corruption if your glasses are dirty. Meanwhile, there are families that have been controlling that continent for hundreds of years.
The funny thing about the European rearmament bluff is that any weapons bought by Europe are eventually going to be aimed at other Europeans. It isn't that Europe needs to defend itself from the outside, it's that Europeans need to be protected from each other.
> and has less class mobility than the US.
So, interestingly, this is something that Americans tend to believe, and that Europeans tend to believe, but it is empirically not true.
Americans in the bottom income quintile are less likely to make it to the top quintile than people in the major European economies, but they are more likely to _believe_ that they can: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...
Mortal enemies? That's a bit dramatic. Whether Trump understands it or not, the EU is his ally and Russia his an example of an "enemy" (i.e. geopolitical competitor).
>> using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX.
So basicaly lets just use some stupid law that lets us randomly take into account all of the other property of a businessowner.
And then EU people wonder why no one wants to build companies in an environment like that...
Common control is a deeply precedented concept. Otherwise you could avoid any consequences by splitting business across infinite entities.
In any case, Musk is the last person to be able to complain about lawlessness.
Limited liability laws are not protection against the consequence for illegal acts. They are exclusively protection against economic risks.
… I mean pretty much everywhere does this sort of thing to some extent. If you don’t, then companies will just put all their risky/liability-attracting activity in a notionally-independent entity with no assets.
Authoritarianism is on the rise world wide. Liberalism (Democracy) is clearly on the decline.
Social media with private intelligence is the cause.
Social media is a private and state intelligence goldmine. Those with resources study what is said and craft messages to influence people's actions in real life. They then pay social media to promote these messages and then use all the data collected via rampant surveillance capitalism in order get feedback. That makes campaign successes measurable and therefore tunable. Penalties alone won't be enough to stop right wing or oligarchic movements in Europe or to protect western liberalism. A fine to an oligarch is only a declaration of war, not a meaningful check on power.
China set up the GFW because they realized that they could not subject illiterate subsistence farmer who have never left their home town to foreign interference, so they created a digital border. Yes, it also serves to put down dissent and that is bad, but it also keeps china more stable than it would be otherwise. Even Americans came around and voted to put the first brick in America's own great firewall by voting to ban TikTok. If the founders didn't bend to the current administration, then it would be banned right now for exactly the risk China saw when they implemented their own digital border.
It is not enough to fine when you have no border. Peter Thiel and his Palantir will actively work against European governments with the aid of X and Facebook by offering aid to those who can afford it with money or loyalty, which gives material power to those with selfish goals, who can use them to craft governments more amenable to their goals: Weak, divided, angry, gridlocked, and most importantly de-regulated.
Europe needs a digital border.
Trying to meddle and interfere with foreign elections wasn't Elon Musk's smartest idea
EU is doing this all the time to its own member states...
Name one example.
https://greekcitytimes.com/2025/04/06/breaking-european-comm...
Note that this is a very one-sided presentation of the issue - most easily seen by the fact that the article doesn't actually link to any of the unshortened quotes they're pushing: https://www.politico.eu/article/fact-check-european-commissi...
Romania and Ukraine ("Euromaidan")
Tell us how did EU interfered with Romania?
Cite specifics if possible.
This is completely wrong and also russian disinformation.
Czechs vote guy who does NAZI salutes on the street, to european parliament, Slovaks voted guy who is lobbying for usage of russian oil and taking bribe of 1% of price of russian oil which slovak state company buys...
So we do not need more conspiracy theories about meddling, we need to address and deal with real things already toxic for community.
Yes as you guessed nothing in here has any relation to ExTwitter nor Youtube nor fakebook. /s
Do you mean russian gas instead of oil?
Worth nothing that russian gas is a lot cheaper than any alternative. Slovakia is not a rich country. It could be that people just want to pay less for their energy.
gas and oil pipelines from russia thru ukraine are slovak state property.
russian gas is cheaper is russian propagandist lie. or it is true but in sense that there are bribes prized in.
slovakia pays market price but percentage of that price is diverted to bank accounts in russia and turkey (or atleast was ,there is chatter that they moved some money to east asia because of sanctions) as a payment for slovak gov signing deal with russia until i think 2030 or 2035 or something like that. for example similar contract with ukraine was signed only for 10 years (i have no info about bribes in UA). and it ended last december...
russia is paying hungary and slovak governments to transport fossils, so governments do not have reason to do reverse adria flow, bring fossils from other pipelines etc etc.
( irony is that someone hacked czech premier Fialas ExTwitter account instead of Filip Turek nazi .... account )
as i understood it, LCOE for battery + renewables is on par with nuclear for years, and similar price of gas peaking... + EU is doing all sorts of programs to lower energy needs of buildings...
"funny" thing is that future chinese battery manufacturing capacity IN EUROPE will displace russian gas in long term...
> russian gas is cheaper is russian propagandist lie.
That's not true. It is cheaper. Logically it makes absolute sense, as it is cheaper to transport through a pipeline than tankers and there is no other pipeline in Europe that can cover what russia used to provide. That's why countries that import Russian gas have significantly cheaper household natural gas prices [1].
I'm not going to get into the bribe tangent. As long as russian gas is cheaper, that will be the biggest reason to buy it IMO.
Switching energy source takes years and huge investment. The big problem is that a lot of households rely on natural natural gas for heating, and a lot of them can't afford to switch.
1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
He spent an outrageous amount to buy his own platform just to boost tweets that ironically highlight how making - or losing - money doesn’t reflect talent in anything else.
Well, he wants to do business in Germany yet when the cameras are on, he can’t suppress Nazi salutes. He says he wants a trial.
There are a compilation of these salutes of top Democrats doing similar gestures. Has there been anything more by Elon on this front in addition to moving his arm (accidentally) in a specific angle?
> Has there been anything more by Elon on this front in addition to moving his arm (accidentally) in a specific angle?
Is this your most honest reaction to his act? Have in mind that he did it twice to be sure everyone got it.
I personally think the resemblance is accidental (have you seen how many times AOC does it in one video?).
But hand gestures weren't the worse thing the nazis in Germany did - have you seen anything else that supports your caim?
Musk retweeted a post suggesting that public sector workers, not Adolf Hitler, were responsible for mass murders during the Holocaust.
But hey. Are you really curious or just cosplaying?
Only the single leader committed the crimes?
Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him, it might drive a wedge between him and Trump and it also pushes him into an obvious conflict of interest. The US started treating everyone else like an adversary, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the favor is being returned.
> Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him
US senators are threatening to withdraw the US from NATO if the EU pushes through with this obvious lawfare.
https://x.com/ianjaeger29/status/1908113116774244838?s=46
Nicely done, Ursula. You’ll get the war you crave so badly.
The US is already de facto withdrawn from NATO. Is there any faith that they would step up if Europe gets attacked?
The thing is, though, minihands’ approach to NATO is such that, a few months in, Poland is talking to France about hosting nuclear warheads. Like “oh, we might withdraw from NATO” is not quite the threat it might have been a few years ago; it’s already somewhat questionable what use NATO is anymore.
If the US withdraw from NATO, that organization will have a new use that is to prevent a hostile annexation of Greenland and Canada.
"Don't touch our oligarch."
If the US withdraws from NATO for this, Article 5 was never gonna be respected.
100% tariff on all Teslas, regardless of which factory they come from.
A total ban on all advertising on Twitter.
This should get the orange man's attention.
Can’t tariff Germany’s factory- how would you even go about legislating that?
The way to go about it so to start mandating that all cars have rain sensors, or dashboard instruments or HUD, or radar if they do TACC or parking sensors - things that most other cars have, but would be a pain for Tesla to add back in for just one region
You can target specific companies with sanctions, like they have done with Russian oligarchs.
Good. I hope they are not timid.
I would also like a 100% tariff on all Tesla cars, regardless of where they are made.
Tesla has a factory in Germany. Tariffs are for exports/imports.
You can target specific companies with sanctions, like they have done with Russian oligarchs.
Again, Tesla has factory in Germany. How are you going to tariff locally produced goods?
By adding 100% to the price on all cars sold that are produced from that factory as long as it is owned by an adversarial individual.
The factory can always be sold to another company.
What a wonderful way to make sure no foreign companies build factories inside EU.
did the russian sanctions do that?
elon musk is no different than your average russian oligarch
Which factory was forced to sell/close because it was sanctioned?
The same approach as the sanctions against Russia can be used against Elon Musk.
> for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation
What does this mean for Reddit? Does the EU regulate Reddit like this as well?
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Interesting news given the recently announced US trade war vs the entire world, with special treatment for rivals like the EU and China.
It seems the EU have decided the most effective response to an oligarchy declaring trade war is to target the leading oligarchs with government influence. Expect more actions which enrage Trump and Musk and an escalation from both sides. This won’t end well for either side IMO.
with special treatment for rivals like the EU
Until three months ago we were also strong allies. But there has been nothing but contempt from the current administration towards the EU and Europe.
That said, the EU usually prepares these cases very meticulously. As the article says, they already started in 2023 and issued a preliminary ruling last year. Also, it seems like the issue can still be settled without a fine:
The European Union and X could still reach a settlement if the company agrees to changes that satisfy regulators’ concerns, the officials said.
That said, it's likely that there have been many deliberations about this and other fines (e.g. Apple) and there were rumors that the EU was going to play softer to appease Trump. But I guess Vance's speech at the NATO conference, the disdain for Europe in the leaked Signal chats (which was completely misplaced because Houthis are attacking vessels as a revenge for Israel's attack on Palestine), and then the high tariffs on EU exports (where Trump only takes into account goods and not services) made the EU decide to show teeth instead.
IMO in the end it's the best thing to do, worst thing is to appear weak with these bullies (apparently Trump called Jean-Claude Juncker 'a brutal killer').
What influence? Musk is already being kicked out of the government.
Don’t believe the stories they tell, look at what they do instead.
But it does make sense: both Musk and Trump are emotionally unstable morons with gigantic egos, their cooperation is doomed to fall apart the moment they have a difference of opinions on something (which just happened, with Musk criticizing tariffs on EU).
> This won’t end well for either side IMO.
Going after Trump-world oligarchs, if that is what’s happening here, is arguably a more viable approach for the EU than the straight-up tariff-mirroring one China is taking.
There is no winning move here unfortunately.
Everyone is going to suffer, some more than others. If we’re lucky the trade war won’t lead to real war with someone like china.
I mean, given the baseline that the EU _has_ to retaliate (IMO the game theory of trade wars dictates this; the EU really can't _not_ retaliate), targeted retaliation against Trump's people, and potentially targeted retaliation against Trump-voting regions (the EU did this in Trump's first attempt at tariff increases a few years back), is likely less damaging than China's approach for the EU (though certainly also lacking in the same degree of shock and awe).
This "example" stuff is pure BS.
Treat everyone equally before the law.
Baiting Musk into some 3AM rage tweets might be a smart move. It would subtly align the anti-Musk forces among Democrats and within the GOP with Europe.
Musk is already (frequently) raging against EU — the topics include freedom of speech and immigration… and calling the foreign minister of Poland “a little man”.
There is a reason the Tesla brand is suffering in Europe.
> and calling the foreign minister of Poland “a little man”.
Just for context, which I think is important here: The foreign minister said Poland is paying for Starlink for Ukraine ($50m/year) and that they will be forced to look at other suppliers if they prove to be unreliable.
Elon responded back claiming that $50m is a small fraction of the cost, there's no substitute and said "Be quiet, little man".
> the topics include freedom of speech and immigration
Most of EU citizens are pro freedom of speech and anti immigration btw.
> Most of EU citizens are pro freedom of speech and anti immigration btw.
Yes, this is clearly true. It also is clearly true that many if not most of EU political parties see freedom of speech as an obstacle and for some unclear reason are reticent to act on their (potential) voter's mandate to radically limit immigration, especially 'culturally incompatible' immigration. They still seem to consider being 'called racist' a threat even though the term 'racist' has lost most of its meaning - when everyone and his dog is a racist it is hardly surprising to be called one.
The EU has a long way to go before it can be considered a paragon of democracy. The commission is not democratically elected, the parliament is but has only limited power. To me - living in Sweden, being a Dutch native - the EU looks like the result of a metastasised bureaucratic infection of the former EEC (the European Economic Community) and I'd much prefer for the moloch of Brussels to be brought to heel and reduced to its former size and glory. That means a much smaller size and a larger glory since a group of countries which voluntarily cooperate economically while retaining their sovereignty is a better model than the current one which mostly seems to be designed to provide hooks for lobbyists and opportunities for grift while providing endless cushy 'jobs' for those who are willing to swallow their integrity.
and he also wants the US to withdraw from NATO, which means directly and concretely increasing the risk of war in Europe. Unpopular measure in Europe obviously.
> he also wants the US to withdraw from NATO, which means directly and concretely increasing the risk of war in Europe
He’s Molotov-Ribentropping Europe with his overtures to Moscow and demands for mineral rights.
> Musk is already (frequently) raging against EU
My point is turning up the temperature of his comments is to Brussels’ benefit.
Accountability is oligarchs’ kryptonite
> E.U. Prepares Major Penalties Against X
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are our friends. They pay so well. /s
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> The EU can’t bully there way out of this one
"This one" what ?
They may actually live to regret it this time.
Screwing with Apple is one thing, but trying to "make an example" out of a company with strong ties to the current administration won't end well for them.
Are we really saying the government of Europe should be afraid of a foreign business? That honestly sounds like even more reason they should be fighting to regulate.
The government of Europe is afraid of losing their censorship regime, and thus their hold on power.
Iphones are/will be hundreds of dollars costlier because of tarrifs, so 1 billion is nothing to anybody... Also DOGE should make payment for that 1 billion faster executed if they really are about efficiency XD
Don't worry, as Trump and Musk says: "someone else pays the tariffs".
Let's see if they realize they are also someone else's else.
and what are you proposing is gonna happen?
The US already completely alienated Europe. What is Trump going to do, declare war on the EU? He's already set the bridge on fire.
Lol, whatcha gonna do? Hit us with tarifs?
There is far, far worse that can happen than merely instituting higher tariffs
If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US. Just read that bullshit quote about what a blue checkbox on a profile means or not means...
>If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US.
What makes you believe that? The current US administration doesn't care about laws in their own country, why would they care about laws in other countries?
> If they actually were issuing this fine because of violations of the DSA they wouldn't be afraid of retaliation from the US
This is the retaliation. We made the first moves. The White House’s contempt for Europe has been laid bare—trying not to anger Trump, at this point, would be superfluous.
When you say the White House’s contempt do you mean when they decided to stop spending money on Ukraine or…?
I’m European and I couldn’t care less about blue checkmarks and I don’t want social networks censoring people. After all, every time the commission has publicly clashed with Musk it has been because the commission wanted more censorship and Musk doesn’t care. On what side should I be?
Yes, nothing else comes to mind, does it? Invading Greenland? Tariffs? And that dosen't even go further than this past week.
P.S: Don't believe the Big Scary Mainstream Media, Elon is very happy to censor people that he disagrees with.
> Elon is very happy to censor people that he disagrees with
Somewhat. Right now Twitter and IG are the least censored major social media.
Are there any independent studies that have confirmed this? I don't think such a study would still be possible given the API access limitations.
We know that Twitter used to comply with far fewer government censorship requests in countries like Turkey and India before Musk took over, so actual data would be great.
I am not aware of any study.
I am talking in regards to censorship by the platform, not from the government/legally required.
It is a personal observation, but one I think it's clearly observeable by anyone that looks at them. I don't need a study to tell me that Tokyo is cleaner than SF, or that 4chan has less censorship than reddit.
My personal observation shows the opposite.
Can you elaborate? Which platform do you find to be less censoring? Any views/accounts in particuular that are censored on Twitter but not other?
I appreciate you asking, but I've had these discussions before, and they've never turned out to be fruitful. At this point I'm only interested in (and going to change my mind if presented with) independent studies, but since those are no longer possible, I don't think this will happen.
Then why comment?!
Why make my initial comment? I keep seeing this assertion in discussions around Twitter, but I've never seen it substantiated beyond personal anecdotes, and it runs counter to my own observations. It's possible that I'm wrong, so I like to ask for data backing up these assertions.
Or are you asking why I made my last comment? I thought it was more polite than just not replying.
> When you say the White House’s contempt do you mean
I mean the attitude shown in Signalgate. Europe is seen as a competitor to American power. (Also, like, threatening to invade an EU member’s territory.)
In practice, I suspect the immediate trigger here was tariffs.
Probably not on the side of the sieg-heiling oligarch.
Yes blue checkmark is also political decision.
They should do 100B - what’re they gonna do? Same for the rest of American big tech. Sue ‘em all, 5B a year. Just pass a law naming them specifically for a special tax.
Does the EU not have protections against bills of attainder?
Not really, no. The lack of such protection is one of the many flaws in the foundational EU treaties and charters.