"The EU’s Threats to Elon Musk Are Empty, Sources Say", 11 October 2022

...Breton gave Musk a 24-hour deadline to respond; Musk told Breton to provide more details publicly. The EU commissioner said his people would be in touch. “No backroom deals,” the billionaire shot back. Breton’s next post on X invited his followers to join him on Bluesky, a competing social media platform.

Breton has become the face of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA)...

But as the bloc tries to enforce its rules on the unruly owner of X, critics say Brussels is becoming more like Elon Musk, rather than the other way around.

“Breton is a politician, eager to keep himself in the press cycle for as long as possible in the run-up to the elections,” says a well-placed source in Brussels, who asks to be anonymous because they work closely with Breton’s team.

This is “really the exact thing we worried would happen if we give enforcement powers to a political commission: using the threat of powers it has to make platforms do things they aren’t actually obliged to do,” says Jan Penfrat, senior policy adviser at Brussels-based digital rights group, EDRi. “We confirm that we are 100 percent in line with enforcement procedures of the DSA,” says an EU official, declining to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Penfrat is worried about political overreach—he agrees that disinformation on X is a problem. There is no legal obligation for platforms to respond in 24 hours, he says, referring to Breton’s letter. “Don't just throw out empty threats on a social media site. This is not how enforcement works,” Penfrat says. “He's playing [by] Elon Musk's rules here, rather than using the ones that he's been given by the law.”...

Allen says she is also concerned that Breton’s letter appears to conflate illegal content and disinformation. Creating a false equivalency between the two is worrying for freedom of expression, she says. “It is for these types of reasons that the DSA treats those content types differently; on the one hand, it contains mandatory obligations to tackle illegal content, and on the other hand increases due diligence to address harmful but lawful content.”...