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CAN EUROPE STOP ELON MUSK?  
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Anne Applebaum
January 27, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ He and other tech oligarchs are making it impossible to conduct
free and fair elections anywhere. _

Elon Musk, ABC News

 

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks
to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded
“dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to
super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns.
Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous,
incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods
through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election
rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it.
The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and
heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political
Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In
Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an
election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate
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In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds
political parties, proportionate to their number of elected
parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and
become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track
election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to
discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public
media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to
all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with
the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on
political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate
speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to
build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning
candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency
matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates,
as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or
anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to
prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has
engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in
the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in
a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese
oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people;
in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of
crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous
social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such
a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania,
or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of
your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames
and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around,
these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to
spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European
politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of
elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by
misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok,
the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose
subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political
advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning
fact-checking on its sites in the U.S.
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also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even
before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were
empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never
been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly
Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user
of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts
running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and
no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or
TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with
political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies
can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election
campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According
to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly
spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before
an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who
declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated
attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian
court canceled the first round of that election
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a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a
feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this
practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people
close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international
political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an
Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role
in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former
British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in
1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the
prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused.
Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything
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but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, _The Sun_, did
endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its
influence, the print edition of _The Sun_ sold 4 million copies a
day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the
constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and
print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech
laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy
is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own.
After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing
police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an
investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for
good.

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X
account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power
to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the
legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed
nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as
publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the
same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do,
say, _The_ _Wall Street Journal_ and CNN. And this, too, has
consequences: Americans have created the information climate that
other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election
practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and
until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to
treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal
systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that
Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and
political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several
European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also
passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their
own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate
hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are
controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is
not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from
interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for
Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform,
available to no other political candidate, in the month before a
national election. The interview, which included several glaringly
false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading”
candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far
beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful
enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies
change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may
soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent
targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full
effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme
circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with
European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but
rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to
platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they
hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive
information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a
curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain
points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political
campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we
don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to
tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced
three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law
(though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court
in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million
for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have
this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily
unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO
wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to
be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an
interviewer
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“why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?”
Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression _free
speech_ to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the
public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan
in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President
Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own
antitrust laws
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“I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe
other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might.
Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that
country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political
activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather
are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck
said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are
weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This,
he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those
for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to
undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the
EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and
bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is
larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on
their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to
undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be
regulated—and they may have the American president on their side.
Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other
democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose
between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run
their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure
of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as
Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and
cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the
sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their
information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally
concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who
have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me
only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them
and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and
harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said
that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty,
and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission
should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how
they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering
that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This
is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las
Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater
transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in
the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers
more control over what they see, and more information about what they
don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These
changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a
better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of
success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal
framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as
viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

_Anne Applebaum
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writer at The Atlantic._

* Elon Musk
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* threat to democracy
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* European elections
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