The right-wing technology baron Elon Musk has called for the abolition of the European Union after it gave his social media platform a €120 million fine for breaching digital services law.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and a cheerleader of the “America First” movement, denounced the EU as a “bureaucratic monster” after the United States accused the bloc in a national security strategy of “undermining political liberty and sovereignty”.
X is the first company to be fine under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which is a bone of contention between Washington and Europe.
The law, which came into effect in 2022, imposes extensive obligations on 19 platforms with more than 45 million active monthly users in the EU, including X, Facebook, Shein and PornHub. They have been told they must take more responsibility for their content and publish more information about their operations.
The European Commission said that X’s use of blue ticks for “verifying” users who paid for its service was deceptive because it exposed others to scams and manipulation. It also said that X had failed to disclose basic information about its adverts, including who had paid for them, and refused to comply with its duty to give researchers access to its data.
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In response, Musk railed against “EU woke Stasi commissars” and threatened to retaliate against the individual officials behind the ruling.
He suggested that they would “understand the full meaning of the Streisand effect”, a phenomenon named after the actress Barbra Streisand, in which efforts to suppress or censor information only bring it to more people’s attention.
On Sunday, X shut down the European Commission’s advertising account on the platform, alleging that it had abused the software to inflate its reach by miscategorising links as videos.
The Trump administration has also criticised the fine. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, described it as an “attack on all American tech platforms and the American people”. JD Vance, the vice-president, wrote on X a few hours before the decision was announced: “The EU should be supporting free speech, not attacking American companies over garbage.”
Over the weekend, several European leaders carefully signalled their discomfort with the Trump administration’s national security strategy, in which Europe was criticised more than Russia or China.
The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, whose country was singled out for criticism, said the US remained its most important ally but that Berlin required no “external advice” on how to conduct its domestic politics.
Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, tweeted to his American followers: “Europe is your closest ally, not your problem.”
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s chief spokesman, said it was a “positive step” that the US had formally stopped describing Russia as a “direct threat”. Peskov said Trump’s administration was “fundamentally different from the previous ones” adding: “The adjustments we’re seeing, I would say, are largely consistent with our vision.”