EU tech chief defends Commission's digital enforcement in face of criticism

MEPs have asked the European Commission for faster and stronger action on platform rules in light of recent developments on X and Meta.

Transcript

00:00We recall here that the objective of the social risk that the freedom of expression versus

00:11censorship MEPs delivered fundamentally different opinions on Tuesday during a debate on European

00:17regulation of digital services.

00:20The owner of social media network X, Elon Musk, was on almost everyone's lips.

00:25For example, I'm from Germany, we are under elections and electoral campaign and timelines

00:29of people are flooded with Elon Musk's own content and with the far right party's content

00:33and everything else is basically gone.

00:35So what the DSA can be used to do is to verify if that's really people's choices or if it's

00:41just Elon Musk's choice and if he manipulated the algorithm to keep people from really reading

00:47what they want to read to inform themselves about the elections.

00:51Many MEPs are calling on the European Commission to fully apply EU regulations and therefore

00:56take action against Elon Musk for alleged breaches of the law on digital services.

01:05The worst way of defending our values and our interests is to pretend nothing is happening,

01:12to be shy, to be timid.

01:13I think the European Commission has all the elements to implement the rules, all the elements

01:21to sanction Elon Musk as a manager and the owners of the platform X and we shouldn't

01:30waste time.

01:33There are voices in the chamber who believe that the European regulation actually resists

01:37freedom of expression and that its implementation should be questioned.

01:42When it comes to disinformation and hate speech, we should not regulate this stuff, we should

01:47not limit this because if you see here, if you follow the debate today, they were basically

01:54hate speech between each other.

01:56But we need to allow this, you need to be allowed to say that someone is an idiot.

02:01I'm not saying that we should say that someone is an idiot, but you are allowed to say it.

02:07The Commission opened proceedings against X in December 2023 and against Meta last May.

02:14Both investigations are still in progress.

02:16In the event of an infringement, fines can reach up to 6% of the company's global turnover.