Left-wing elites are not happy about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
While speaking at the World Economic Forum, European politician Věra Jourová threatened Musk with sanctions if he continues to allow free speech on his platform.
Jourová claimed: “We will have the Digital Services Act [DSA]. We will have the Code of Practice as a part of this legislation, so, after Mr. Musk took over Twitter with his ‘freedom of speech absolutism’ – we are the protectors of freedom of speech as well. But at the same time, we cannot accept, for instance, illegal content online and so on. So, our message was clear: we have rules which have to be complied with, otherwise there will be sanctions.”
New European legislation is even going as far as fining tech companies for what they’d considered free speech going unchecked.
Euronews scarily reports: “A suite of new legislation, including the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), was signed off by the EU parliament in October 2022 and is expected to come into force later this year, under the new regulatory framework, which aims to protect the rights of online users and remove illegal content or disinformation, platforms could expect to be fined up to 6 per cent of their annual revenue if found to violate the rules by EU regulators.”
She continued “So, I always like to combine decent communication and discussion, and testing how far they can go under the framework of some sort of social responsibility.”
On Tuesday, Jourová garnered attention by suggesting that the United States will soon implement laws addressing what they deem “hate speech.”
She told World Economic Forum panelist Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. “What qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in the U.S.,” claims Jourová. “I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law, we need the platforms to simply work with the language and to identify such cases.”
Jourová also mentioned that in past years, European politicians and major technology companies used informal “gentlemen’s agreements” and other methods of negotiation rather than legislation.
Musk’s management of Twitter has been a strikingly different from the restrictive speech patterns prevalent on Twitter and other major technology companies. In December, Musk stated “New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.”
