Elon Musk and the EU bureaucrats seem perfectly suited for each other. X has devolved into a profit-driven digital madhouse, and it’s hard to see why Europeans should spend public money trying to regulate it.
Once again, America’s tech oligarchs are clashing with the European “Euligarchs.” Honestly, when will they all just board a rocket to Mars and leave the rest of us alone?
Brussels has slapped Musk’s platform with a €120 million fine for allegedly flouting the Digital Services Act. Musk fired back by posting an image morphing the EU flag into a swastika.
It’s difficult to sympathize with either side, since both Musk and the EU preside over their own types of authoritarianism.
As much as I hate to admit it, X has become a dictatorship of stupidity.
I initially had high hopes when Musk purchased the site and promised a global marketplace of open debate. Instead, it’s become a smoldering wreck.
Scrolling for even a few seconds exposes users to a flood of soft-porn, AI-generated junk, and endless spammy threads designed solely to manipulate the algorithm.
The platform also mysteriously amplifies certain loud, attention-seeking extremists, while burying more reasonable or news-focused accounts. It’s like walking through New York City and having to step over an army of eccentrics just to reach someone with something worthwhile to say.
X seems to attract a disproportionate number of middle-aged divorced men behaving like obnoxious adolescents—apparently liberated from both marriage and social norms. It feels like walking into a terrible dive bar full of imitators trying to channel Musk himself, who constantly lectures women about producing more children to save humanity, even as some of his numerous mothers-of-his-children occasionally appear on the platform trying to contact him about their kids.
Musk’s so-called global town square looks more like a sprawling bazaar of attention-seekers—of every variety.
If you refuse to pay for a blue check and hand over personal and financial details to Musk, the platform treats you like a spam bot. So much for respecting privacy.
Recently, X also enabled a feature that exposes your location and signup country to anyone who clicks your profile, without any opt-out option. Supporters claim this helps identify foreign propaganda accounts. As if those accounts say anything noticeably different from the countless influencers gaming the algorithm with sensationalist, juvenile content—especially now that cash payouts reward this behavior. Yet, for some reason, Musk’s fans are celebrating this obvious erosion of privacy.
The platform has become so sluggish, messy, and overloaded that it’s hard not to wonder what scripts are running behind the scenes and why. Forgive me if I don’t have much faith in America’s tech bros. As the saying goes, the devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
And we’ve recently seen how U.S. tech companies have cooperated with Israeli firms founded by Unit 8200 veterans to operate parts of America’s surveillance infrastructure. Homeland Security even bragged about its partnership with an Israeli company with ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak. Palantir refined its surveillance tools in Gaza while securing U.S. contracts for domestic monitoring.
Earlier this year, Musk and Palantir announced a collaboration on AI and data. But while Musk’s cheerleaders celebrate the exposure of India-based accounts’ locations, they seem oblivious to the far more serious lack of transparency surrounding these larger, more troubling data-driven ventures.
So when the EU calls out X for being a chaotic mess, it isn’t entirely wrong—especially regarding transparency around blue checks and deceptive ads.
Where the EU goes too far is in demanding that X give researchers access to public platform data. If they want it, they can go sift through the filth themselves. They’ll quickly discover what everyone already knows: X has become the modern digital version of Bedlam, where the most unhinged users are pushed to center stage by the algorithm for clicks and profit.
The fact that EU officials still treat X as something worth formally regulating only highlights how unserious they are. Why not simply ignore it like the rest of us? Free speech means the fools can stay in their online echo chambers, shouting at one another and trying to outdo each other’s nonsense for attention. Let them. It keeps them off the streets and out of public discourse.
But of course, the EU’s control-obsessed bureaucrats insist on targeting the man running the world’s biggest for-profit virtual asylum, as if it were some kind of sacred institution.
