Brussels reportedly fears the AfD party could gain an “unfair advantage” ahead of next month’s snap elections
The EU Commission plans to deploy a large team of experts and officials to monitor Elon Musk’s upcoming live interview with the co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, Politico reported on Thursday.
The event, which is scheduled for Thursday evening, could give the AfD an “unfair advantage” ahead of next month’s snap parliamentary elections in Germany, Brussels believes, according to the media outlet.
A total of 150 specialists from the EU Commission’s DG CONNECT tech department and Seville-based European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency will monitor the conversation, Politico reported. According to the publication, the team will focus not on its content but on the algorithms used by X during the live feed.
Brussels fears that the Musk-owned platform could provide a major boost to the right-wing party through its internal algorithms after the billionaire praised the party in a tweet in December.
“How much is [it] or will it be boosted? This is what the Commission will be looking at,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters on Monday, commenting on Brussels’ plans. According to Politico, X could potentially help the AfD politician reach a larger audience or downgrade content from the party’s competitors.
The monitoring team has been granted far-reaching powers under the EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA) and can request access to anything from the platform’s inner workings to internal correspondence.
Under the DSA, the EU can slap online platforms with fines of up to 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to combat illegal content and disinformation and follow the bloc’s transparency rules. X has been in Brussels’ crosshairs since December 2023 and faced charges in July 2024 for allegedly misleading its users, lacking transparency, and failing to provide some public data.
According to Politico, all the data gathered on Thursday evening could be used to bolster that case but the ultimate decision to proceed with the charges will be taken “at the very top of the Commission.”
EU tech czar Henna Virkkunen and her colleague Michael McGrath released a letter this week saying that Brussels plans to “energetically advance with the case.”
In December, Musk called AfD the only party capable of “saving Germany” and praised its anti-immigration stance while calling Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool.” The German leader hit back by claiming that the billionaire could be just craving attention online and called on people not to “feed the troll.”
The head of the German digital regulator, Klaus Muller, has called for a more relaxed approach towards Musk in the EU. “Not everything that you get upset about is also illegal,” he told Deutschlandfunk Radio on Thursday. Freedom of expression always means “the freedom of those whose opinion you do not share,” he said, speaking against what he called the “insane attention” towards the billionaire.
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