EU charges Elon Musk’s X for letting disinfo run wild
The tech mogul’s platform is the first to get hit with charges under new EU social media law.
The European Union is calling Elon Musk to order over how he turned social media site X into a haven for disinformation and illegal content.
The EU Commission on Friday formally charged X for failing to respect EU social media law. The platform could face a sweeping multi-million euro fine in a pioneering case under the bloc's new Digital Services Act (DSA), a law to clamp down on toxic and illegal online content and algorithms.
Musk's X has been in Brussels' crosshairs ever since the billionaire took over the company, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022. X has been accused of letting disinformation and illegal hate speech run wild, roll out misleading authentication features and blocking external researchers from tools to scrutinize how malicious content on the platforms spreads.
The European Commission oversees X and two dozens of the world's largest online platforms including Facebook, YouTube and others. The EU executive's probe into Musk's firm opened in December 2023 and was the first formal investigation. Friday's charges are the first-ever under the DSA.
Infringements of the DSA could lead to fines of up to 6 percent of a X’s global revenue.
Is 6% of global revenue enough? Or is that just a foot note in the books on the cost of doing business?
It's 6% of revenue, not profit. So it cuts even more into profits as it doesn't allow a company in breach of regulations to reduce the impact of the fine by adding expenses that will temporarily lower their profit.
Even more spicy, they can also impose periodic penalties up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover for each day of delay in complying. That shit can bankrupt you.
6% of profit would mean that EU owes twitter money.
Or Musk could pull Twitter out of the EU.
That would be so wonderful. The EU economy would probably take off just from the saved time/brainpower, lol.
Thank you for showing me the teeth behind this ruling. If non-compliance carries harsher consequences, it may be enough
That could realistically be around 1/3 yearly profit in a reasonable company (18% operating margin is common). No idea whether Twitter is currently profitable (it wasn't when he bought it).
An example could be AliExpress, with a 130B in revenue and 11B in profit (2023), it would reduce their profit to 3.2B with the 6% fine. That's a whopping 70% less profits, and cutting expenses isn't gonna fix it either.
Question still stands, is it enough?
yeah it seems big enough that it might be cheaper to hire moderators
Hire? There's enough nazis dying to get that job for free.
I mean that seems reasonably punishing yeah, not nearly the hours worth of profit usually charged to companies breaking the law. I believe the EU can even enforce its own content moderation on the site and charge the costs of that to Musk so its pointless for a company to not follow the laws at that point ...
Musk will buy a company and tank it for the memes. I don’t think a warning shot like this will sway his decisions on the direction of said company. The people making the decisions aren’t culpable, the company is. The people making the decisions will just leave to a different company and we can start the whole process over again.
I hope it’s enough and I sound like a bitter old man.
Then he can tank it for the memes. Do that to enough companies and the "weird genius techbro" mask starts slipping and the venture capitalists no longer want to bankroll you and you start being seen as a liability.
God that would be great to see, what a temper tantrum that would be.
Historically, no, because companies still misbehave, the fines aren't high enough for them to not try and see whether they get away with stuff.
OTOH, historically, yes, because once fines come flying companies shape up.
That is, they're willing to gamble on that initial fine, but absolutely won't tank the recurring fines for continued infringement.