European Commission vice-president warned Musk against allowing propaganda on Twitter
The Vice President of the European Commission, Věra Jourová, warned the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, that the company must fight against russian propaganda regarding the war in Ukraine.
Jourová stated this in an interview with Bloomberg.
She said that the inability to distinguish between misleading online content could "lead to the very quick abuse" on Twitter.
"By not acting actively against the propaganda, which means to remove the pieces of propaganda, the disinformation, then you are actively supporting the war… This would be a very tricky and maybe dangerous endeavor or adventure for Mr. Musk, who 'wants to be seen as somebody who is helping Ukraine,'" Jourova remarked.
At the same time, she mentioned Mask's Starlink satellite system, which provides an Internet connection for both civilians and the military in Ukraine.
"If the network is easily used by russian propaganda, then "you are very probably breaching the rules of sanctions because you might be distributing the content developed by the sanctioned media, like russia Today and Sputnik," Yurova said.
She also emphasized that Musk, who has vowed to return "freedom of speech" to Twitter, should not underestimate the EU and the significant sanctions that the social network may face if it does not follow the rules of the European Union.
"I feel that there is not enough understanding from Mr. Musk and maybe some other people around him that Europe is advanced," said Jourova. And "that after many years of thorough analyzing how to approach the digital sphere, we decided to regulate, and that we mean it, that the regulation has to be respected by everybody who wants to do business on EU territory," the vice-president of the EC said.
At the beginning of October, Elon Musk expressed the opinion that the result of the escalation of the conflict between russia and Ukraine could be a nuclear war and offered a poll on his Twitter page, in which he compiled his own formula for ending the war.
He proposed holding another referendum and providing water to Crimea.
In response, President Volodymyr Zelensky organized his own poll on Twitter about "which Musk is better": the one who supports Ukraine or the one who is for russia.
Musk later wrote that he still strongly supports Ukraine but "is convinced that a large-scale escalation of the war will cause great damage to Ukraine and possibly the world."
