Two experts have told Euronews that the EU must ready itself to stand firm in the face of belligerence from an incoming Donald Trump regime.
Two experts have told Euronews that the EU must ready itself to stand firm in the face of belligerence from an incoming Donald Trump regime.
Demands by some in Trump’s team for Europe to water down or abandon important social media regulations would weaken democracy and “won’t guarantee Europe’s security in the long run”, according to think tank Bruegel’s Guntram Wolff and the European Policy Centre’s Georg Riekeles.
“We were all taken aback by how aggressive both Musk and Donald Trump have been in this first half of January, really not attacking Russia or China, but really attacking allies verbally,” ULB Professor of Economics at Guntram Wolff told Euronews’ Europe Conversation.
“Elon Musk has had a huge campaign against the UK’s current sitting government and that has raised alarm bells all across Europe,” he said.
Both experts said the European Commission should confront Musk and other social media outlets if and when instances of a breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) occur and are deemed a genuine threat to European democracy or society.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the EU’s key legal tool for monitoring social media outlets for disinformation and harmful content.
Elon Musk has reignited a political debate in the UK around the crimes of gangs of men who systemically groomed and raped children in English towns over several decades.
In a flurry of posts on his social platform X, the billionaire has taken aim at senior UK Labour figures, claiming prime minister Keir Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”
He also called safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and called for her to be imprisoned.
A spokesperson for the European Commission has said it is monitoring Musk’s activity regarding potential interference in the forthcoming German election.
Musk has endorsed the far-right AfD party in Germany saying they’re the “last spark of hope” for the country, and recently held a 90-minute interview with the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel on his platform.
“The interview is really not a problem. What is a problem is if the algorithm of X gets manipulated to really drive far-right content and then it becomes an issue,” said Wolff.
However he flagged hesitancy among European governments as well as the Commission to take full-throated action against Musk lest Trump respond with a reprisal in the form of economic tariffs.
“We need the political will to act. This is deadly serious,” said Riekeles, a former advisor to Michel Barnier at the European Commission.
“This is about fundamental threats to our democracies, is about the restructuring of our public space, the promotion of lies, of extreme content which will make the exercise of democracy progressively more difficult or impossible,” he said.
Incoming US Vice President JD Vance has suggested that the Trump administration could reduce or end support for NATO if the EU pursues its regulation of ‘X’.
“You always have to stand up to bullying,” said Wolff, in response to Europe being torn between the choice of applying its own regulatory system to protect democracies or riling Trump who could respond by issuing trade tariffs, or abandoning European security at a time of major peril.
“If you give in immediately, the demands will only increase. And there’s no guarantee whatsoever that if you don’t stand up on X and to X and bullying on X, that then all of a sudden all security problems will be solved,” he said.
European regulators have been probing X since December 2023, but Musk’s close ties to Trump have raised questions about how the bloc will handle the platform and its suspected DSA violations.
The Commission, the German regulator, and the large digital platforms, including X, are scheduled to meet on 24 January to prevent interference during the German election.
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