The De-Regulatory Turn of the EU Commission
The current events in the US, especially the takeover of executive branches by the non-elected private citizen Elon Musk, left legal scholars and other constitutional experts in a state of shocked disbelief. From a European perspective, many consider such a development unthinkable. However, we should not be too certain about that. The current decision of the EU Commission to carry out a “de-regulatory turn” illustrates how strongly a technical innovation narrative – one that has contributed to the success of individuals like Musk and their corporate conglomerates – is catching on globally.
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Musks Megafon als Parteispende?
Während die Influencer-Kooperationen von Habeck, Lindner, Merz, Scholz und Wagenknecht kaum diskutiert wurden, erregte Elon Musks Unterstützung der AfD sogar international Aufsehen. Sein Gespräch mit Alice Weidel und sein Stream des AfD-Parteitags generierten zusammen bisher rund 100 Millionen Aufrufe. Die Unterstützung politischer Parteien in sozialen Medien stellt die neuen Regeln zu Werbemaßnahmen durch Dritte auf die Probe.
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Zuckerberg’s Strategy
On January 7, 2025, and in the days following, the founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, made a series of statements that framed Meta's previous and future content policy with an evidently strategic intention. The change of content moderation policy, as described in three comprehensive points in his personal announcement on his own platforms, may even sound reasonable, as discussed below. However, the reasoning and the framing of these changes appear to show that Meta is up to something entirely different from just further optimizing its curation of content on its platforms.
Continue reading >>Musk, Techbrocracy, and Free Speech
In this blogpost, I situate and address Musk’s position within the broader EU debate on freedom of expression. The purpose of this symposium is to elucidate aspects that make Musk, his influence, and his provocations to the EU legal order, problematic under EU law, and, should we consider his influence as unwanted, harmful or illegal, whether EU law can provide answers to it. This post centres on three points: (i) Musk’s changes to X’s content moderation process, (ii) Musk’s usage of X to amplify select political candidates and (iii) Musk’s ownership of Starlink. It ends with a note on how this fits in a grander theme, which has been dubbed by commentators such as Paul Bernal as the ‘techbrocracy’.
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