“Absurd”: Musk threatens response to EU over “absurd fine” to X

Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk stated this Friday that it would be “appropriate” to respond to the European Union’s (EU) decision to impose a multimillion-dollar fine on his social network X. “The ‘EU’ imposed this absurd fine not only on X, but also on me personally, which is even more crazy!” Musk stated on his platform. “Therefore, it would be appropriate to direct our response not only to the EU, but also to the people who took this action against me,” he expressed.

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Musk also left numerous comments, including in replies, in which he condemned Brussels for censorship and denounced its tendencies totalitarian and attacks on democracy on the Web. Similarly, reacted to a user’s post that X is now the number one app in several European countries, including the UK, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy, saying that it is the “Streisand effect“, a phenomenon by which an attempt to censor, hide, or silence information causes it to receive much more attention and dissemination. “The woke Stasi commissioners of the EU are about to understand the full meaning of the ‘Streisand effect’,” Musk quipped, comparing the European control entities to the Ministry for State Security of East Germany.

This Friday, the European Commission imposed on the social network X a fine of 120 million euros (140 million dollars) for infringing the Digital Services Act (DSA). After a two-year investigation, Brussels concluded that X engaged in a deceptive design of its blue verification mark, lack of transparency in its advertising repository, and refusal to offer researchers access to public data.

The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, called the EC’s decision a “attack by foreign governments on all American digital resources and the American people”.