EU Picks Fight With Elon & X … That Was A Mistake
If this story had a soundtrack, it would be Clapton's 'Before You Accuse Me'
It’s a story that began with Elon getting slapped with a massive fine, shifted to him holding up a massive mirror their hypocrisy, and ended with Elon calling for the abolition of the UN.
Kind of a wild ride, really.
On Thursday, Europe slapped a fine of 120 Million Euro on X. What the fine was about, in their own words:
Commission Fines X
3 points mentioned in their press release were:
1) Deceptive design of X’s ‘blue checkmark’ [They allege that the company does not really ‘verify’ their blue check users to their satisfaction, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of the account with which they are interacting.] Insert jokes about how shocked they are to find your favorite parody are not long-dead famous people, fictional characters, or inanimate objects.
2) Lack of transparency of X’s ads repository — This will come up again, but they want searchable repositories so they can detect scams, coordinated info ops, and information about the legal entity paying for an ad.
3) Failure to provide researchers access to public data — Terms of service prohibit ‘independently accessing its public data, including through scraping’. Of course, Elon has no interest in letting Grok’s competitors use X.com as a training forum for other AI, and there are all sorts of other reasons, recent and otherwise, to distrust European instincts to look over the shoulder at the ordinary communication of regular people.
Elon Catches Them Red-Handed
Head of Product at X countered with this post exposing deceptive behavior of their own:
Deceptive behavior which violated their terms of service, and violated precisely the rules for which they fined X.
Elon turns spotlight on the antidemocratic EU
He’s calling for it to be abolished.
They’re not even un-democratic. They are a non-responsive bureaucracy that dictates to the member nations how they ought to live.
And some European leaders are now echoing his sentiment.
Viktor Orban has a tweet listing specific examples making his case that ‘The EU is Drowning In Corrpution’.
Not sure Brussels will be super-happy about their dirty laundry secrets turned into an international story, but such is the nature (and value) of free speech.
Has the EU crippled ‘X’? Hardly.
Since the fine, it has now become the #1 news app in every single European country….
A fact he quote tweeted with a caption ‘Streisand Effect’.
IYKYK.