This Elon Musk crackdown is starting to look ridiculous

Elon Musk bought Twitter, then broke it. Which is a bummer, but not illegal.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and promptly went about making the company worth much, much less by scaring away users and advertisers.

That seems dumb! But not illegal.

European regulators feel differently. They think that Musk’s self-imposed penalty — owning a service so hapless it can’t even launch a half-baked slate of video podcasts — isn’t nearly enough. So they want to fine him for screwing up his own service.

What specifically did Musk do to incur the European Commission’s wrath? The first sentence of its press release accuses Musk of violating regulations regarding “dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.” And, to be fair, “dark patterns” sounds pretty ominous!

But it turns out that European regulators — who are still using Twitter, which Musk now calls X — are just like any run-of-the-mill Twitter addict: They have complaints about the product. Specifically, the blue checks.

Here’s Commissioner Thierry Breton:

Back in the day, #BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information✔️🐦

Now with X, our preliminary view is that:

❌They deceive users

❌They infrige #DSA

X has now the right of defence —but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines & require significant changes. pic.twitter.com/M9tGA5pYQr

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) July 12, 2024

The story of Elon and the blue checks has been told — many, many times. The latest update is that after taking away blue checks from many “verified users” like myself and my colleague Katie Notopoulos, he handed them back this spring. For free. Anyone else who wants one can pay $8 a month.

Which, again: Dumb.

But in America, if you want to run through your own store, tear down the signage, and throw your merchandise on the floor, that’s your right. Hard to see why it should be any different in Europe.

The sober, big-picture analysis I’m supposed to provide here is about what this says about Europe’s overall efforts to reign in Big Tech, and how it’s become the world’s primary tech regulator since the US can’t or won’t do real regulation, and how some of Europe’s moves seem well-intentioned but muddled, and other moves may be flat-out overreach.

But you can read that somewhere else.

This one is way simpler: The world is full of problems. Elon Musk’s approach to blue checks is not one that requires government intervention.