Elon Musk is reportedly considering withdrawing social network X (formerly Twitter) from access in the European Union.
This follows the billionaire's reported dissatisfaction with European regulation on digital services, according to Business Insider which cited a source close to the company.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires major online platforms to act consistently and quickly to remove hate speech and other illegal content. X recently received a list of questions from the European Commission, which wanted to know more about how the service was fulfilling its obligations.
The Commission wants to interrogate X in relation to the perceived spread of calls for violence and false information on its platform following the Islamist Hamas attack on Israel. Commissioner Thierry Breton referred in particular to reporting using manipulated images and recordings of video games. These were sometimes mistaken for real images. Elon Musk has expressed his incomprehension at these demands.
Breaches of the European regulation committed by social media companies reportedly carry heavy penalties.
Business Insider stated that the head of X is considering the possibility of no longer making the social network available in the EU or blocking access to users in the region. Musk did not react to Business Insider's information, while X usually responds to press enquiries by saying briefly that it is currently busy.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has not yet launched Threads in Europe, a rival service to X deployed earlier this year in the United States, again for reasons linked to the European DSA regulation.
