EU Commission urged to act over Elon Musk’s ‘interference’ in elections

Brussels: The EU executive has been too slow in enforcing a major law intended to ensure good behaviour of social media companies, MEPs have said, amid growing concern about the aggressive forays of Elon Musk into European politics.

Pressure on the European Commission to act is growing as Musk, the X owner and world’s richest man, prepares to host a livestream conversation on the platform on Thursday with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, Alice Weidel.

The conversation with Musk, whose website claims he has 211.4 million followers, is seen as handing a significant advantage to the AfD as Germany prepares for elections on 23 February.

Damian Boeselager, an MEP, co-founder of the pan-European Volt party and candidate for the Bundestag in the German election, has written to the Commission urging it to examine Musk’s “interference” in European elections.

The MEP wants the Commission to investigate whether X’s apparent promotion of Musk’s tweets is legal under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which came into force in 2022.

Speaking to the Guardian, Boeselager said the system used to amplify Musk’s tweets was “probably illegal under the DSA”, because he believes it fails to meet the law’s transparency requirements.

He became aware that the X algorithm had been reconfigured to promote Musk’s tweets after a report in tech news site Platformer last February that Musk later appeared to confirm, by posting a meme about forcing followers to consume his tweets.

The MEP told the Guardian he had become more concerned about the issue recently after Musk waded into European politics, for example with a post last month when he said “only the AfD can save Germany”.

The MEP said: “I don’t understand why people believe that free speech is not affected by the concentration of opinion-making power in the hands of the few. For me, that has rather illiberal, autocratic tendencies, rather than liberal tendencies, when one voice is so much more powerful than all the others.”

On Wednesday France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, added to pressure on the Commission to use EU law in a tougher way. “Either the European Commission applies with the greatest firmness the laws that exist to protect our unique space or it does not and in that case it should think about giving the capacity to do so back to the member states of the European Union, to France,” he said.

The DSA, which came into force in 2022, is meant to clamp down on companies “too big to care” and imposes duties to remove illegal content, tackle disinformation and protect elections.

Companies found to have broken the DSA can be fined up to 6% of global turnover or banned from operating in the EU.

After an initial investigation, the Commission last July accused X of violating the DSA in three areas, including by “deceiving users” by allowing anyone to buy so-called blue-tick “verification”, which has opened the door to scammers. The Commission, since last month under new leadership on tech policy, has yet to conclude the investigation, which was launched in December 2023.

Arba Kokalari, a Swedish centre-right lawmaker who was involved in drafting the DSA, told the Guardian that the commission was “very slow or too slow” in investigating social media platforms, including X.

Referring to X and other social media companies, she said: “There is a spread of disinformation and so much illegal content and these platforms are not respecting the DSA and our rules. So I think the Commission could do more in the framework that we have given them as legislators.”

Christel Schaldemose, a Social Democrat vice-president of the European parliament, said the Commission needed to “step up” enforcement of the DSA, and “do things faster” and “more proactively” to ensure platforms were doing enough to protect against a “systemic risk against democracy”.

Referring to Musk, she asked: “Is it fair that one person can adjust his algorithms in a way that makes him and his politics and opinions more prevalent than others? Is it OK? Is it risky? Is it in line with the DSA?”

The former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, who clashed with colleagues over how to handle X, has suggested that Musk’s support for the AfD constitutes foreign interference, and described his forthcoming conversation with Weidel as handing “a significant and valuable advantage” to the AfD leader.

The Commission said earlier this week that its investigation was ongoing, without indicating when it might be complete: “We are talking about a private business and we need to make sure our position is well founded,” a spokesperson said.

The Commission, the spokesperson said, would “carefully analyse” the Weidel-Musk conversation. “Nothing in the DSA prohibits such a live stream,” the spokesperson said. “What we want, however, is that the owner of the platform … or the provider of the platform make sure that the platform is not misused or giving a preferential treatment to certain types of content, or an increased visibility to just one type of content.”

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Spain added its voice on Wednesday to the governments of the UK, France and Germany, which have criticised Musk’s hostile and often misleading tweets about European politics and society. In one of his latest salvoes, Musk reposted an account that contained a screenshot of rape convictions in Catalonia.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, accused Musk of heading an “international reactionary movement” that “openly attacks our institutions, stirs up hatred and openly calls for the support of the heirs of Nazism in Germany’s upcoming elections”.