When X owner Elon Musk announced a digital fireside chat on the app with former US president and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, at least one EU official promptly went ballistic.
EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton reacted to the online promotion of the exclusive event with a threat – the kind of thing that goes over far better on an official company letterhead (the European Commission’s in this case) than, say, in a whispery, untraceable phone call.
“I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU,” Breton wrote to Musk.
He warned the billionaire about ongoing compliance investigations and insisted on the need to mitigate “amplification of harmful content” which “if unaddressed might… generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.”
Ah, yes. Because anything that goes against the official EU establishment narrative and agenda is generally considered to be a threat to public order. The plebs might actually discover some inconvenient realities that better explain why daily life in Europe has become more challenging than that of our gatekeeping overlords.
Worse, they may decide to do something about it, which presents an even greater inconvenience to the ruling establishment in that they may actually have to rework some of their policies to the detriment of some opaque special interests.
How fitting that Breton evoked the recent unrest in the UK, which wasn’t caused by an actual migrant........