EU Commissioner issues warning to Meta and X bosses over misinformation regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict

Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market has publicly shared two letters on X, one addressed to X's CEO Elon Musk, and one addressed to Meta's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In both letters the Commissioner said that he wished to 'recall the obligations of the DSA act'.

The Digital Services Act, published in October 2022 was designed to foster 'a safe and accountable online environment' and to mitigate 'systemic risks, such as manipulation or disinformation'. Fake news, deep fakes and misinformation has plagued elections and public discourse over recent years with Ireland setting up its own media regular in March of this year Cóimisiún na Meán.

In both letters Breton described the events in Israel as 'terrorist attacks' by Hamas. He stated in both that the respective platforms had failed to moderate content properly, stating that 'we are seeing a surge of illegal content and disinformation being disseminated in the EU via certain platforms'. Breton asked Zuckerberg to 'be very vigilant in strict compliance with the DSA rules on the terms of service'.

Speaking to Zuckerberg specifically, the commissioner also raised issue with how Meta moderates content with regards to elections. Although Breton noted increased cooperation with independent authorities in recent Slovakian elections, he raised concerns for upcoming elections in Poland, The Netherlands, Lithuania, Croatia, Austria, Romania and the European Parliament elections and requested Zuckerberg to respond to Breton's team with updates on how Meta intends to address misinformation and deep fakes in these elections.

In his letter addressed to Musk he raised three issues. Firstly he said that X needed to set out its guidelines in relation to what content was permitted on the platform and that X must stick to these guidelines.

Breton continued on to say that X needed to respond in a more timely fashion when illegal content was flagged saying 'We have, from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities'.

The final issue raised was that X has not placed mitigation measures to 'tackle the risks to public security' with regards to misinformation.

The EU Commissioner urged Musk to cooperate with the relevant law enforcement authorities including Europol and to respond to Breton's letter within 24 hours. Under the post sharing Thierry's Breton's letter, Musk replied in a candid manner:

Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.

Please list the violations you allude to on , so that that the public can see them.

Merci beaucoup.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 10, 2023

Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Musk has made a series of changes including the controversial renaming of the social media platform to 'X', to adding new features such as 'community notes' which allows users to add context or additional information under popular tweets.

On October 7th Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, launching 3000 rockets. Israel quickly retaliated, formally declaring war on Hamas the following day. As of October 12th over 330,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the Gaza strip with over 2700 casualties.

On Wednesday morning, Breton posted on X that he had joined Bluesky, a rival social media platform created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. “Even though the grass is not (always) greener on the other side, the sky is sometimes… bluer.Let’s keep in touch!' the commissioner wrote.