Recently, EU officials wrote to Elon Musk to remind him of his company’s legal obligations regarding the European Commission’s Digital Service Act. However, a person close to Elon Musk said that he would rather block X to the whole region and make the X app unavailable for Europeans than comply with the rules.
The latest debacle stems from the recent events in Israel where people would often see a series of posts with disinformation, which goes unchallenged on the social network. Video game footage passed off as breaking news, old videos from Syria are being recycled and attributed to this or that attack.
Journalists and researchers say that X is borderline useless as a news source because it contains so much disinformation. In some cases, antisemitic hate speech and posts glorifying terrorism go by unnoticed. Moreover, Musk himself has repeatedly shared posts from accounts spreading racist content and conspiracy theories.
People familiar with the matter believe that if Musk blocks Europe, the website’s traffic will fall by around 9%, which would further add to the X’s troubles in this regard. The social network’s daily usage is reportedly already 40% down in some regions for the past couple of months.
