The European Commission has said that it was not consulted by a senior official before he sent a threatening letter to Elon Musk, ahead of the billionaire's live interview on his X Spaces platform (formerly Twitter) with US presidential candidate Donald Trump.
A letter sent by Thierry Breton, the bloc's Internal Market commissioner in charge of enforcing the Digital Services Act (DSA), insisted that Musk had an obligation to censor potentially “harmful content” on his platform.
“The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated or agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners],” a European Commission spokesman said on Tuesday.
Breton did not seek approval from President Ursula von der Leyen, another official told Financial Times on condition of anonymity.
”Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking,” the official said.
Sources close to Breton told the outlet that the letter had been in the works for some time, but the Trump interview presented an appropriate “trigger point” for publishing it.
Musk responded to Breton’s letter with a meme from the 2008 comedy ‘Tropic Thunder’, in which Tom Cruise’s character shouts, “Take a big step back and literally f**k your own face!”
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign accused the EU of “trying to meddle in the US presidential election” and advised the bloc to mind its own business.
Four EU officials, speaking to Politico on condition of anonymity, said the bloc wanted to avoid the appearance of election meddling.
“The EU is not in the business of electoral interference,” said one of them. “DSA implementation is too important to be misused by an attention-seeking politician in search of his next big job.”
Last month, Breton announced that the European Commission considered X to be in violation of the DSA and intended to levy massive fines against Musk’s company unless it agreed to restrictions on “hate speech” and “misinformation.”
“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” Musk wrote in response. “The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
Breton vocally denied the existence of such an offer, but Musk replied he was looking forward to “a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.”
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, after voicing displeasure over widespread censorship on the US-based social media platform.