The European Commission has launched a new investigation into X following outrage over the use of its AI tool, Grok, to generate and distribute sexually explicit images of women and children.
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The investigation, being conducted under the Digital Services Act (DSA), will look into whether Elon Musk’s company properly assessed and mitigated the risks linked to the deployment of Grok’s functionalities in the EU.
X… or W?
Formal proceedings were already underway against X regarding systemic risks in its recommender systems. Now Grok itself is specifically under investigation – and for more than just sexual content, with calls to investigate it for other alleged infringements of EU law, including antisemitism, dating back at least to last summer.
The Digital Services Act is the EU’s landmark law that regulates big online platforms, making them more accountable for illegal content and disinformation in order to tackle societal risks online. It enforces the principle that what is illegal offline is also illegal online. X was already fined 120 million euros in December for breaching transparency rules under this regulation.
For its part, the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act uses a risk-based framework to govern AI systems, looking out for such things as bias, discrimination and accountability gaps. Prohibited AI applications are banned, while high-risk systems face strict, enforceable obligations.
During the plenary session in Strasbourg last week, MEPs called for stricter enforcement of EU legislation to protect Europeans from fake and/or harmful content. Calls that have, at least in part, been answered by the Commission’s actions this week.
On announcing the new investigation on Monday (26 January), Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier stressed that the US-based social media platform’s decision to partially restrict access to these image-editing functionalities changed nothing. His statement is shared by Latvijas Radio.
Thomas Regnier, European Commission Spokesperson (in English):
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“We have seen over the last weeks and month, antisemitic content. We have seen non-consensual deepfakes of women, and we have seen child sexual abuse material. In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights. One [may] argue that X has limited this to premium subscribers. Let’s be very clear, child sexual abuse material is not a premium privilege. […] Such output has no place in Europe, and we need to protect our citizens from potential future harm.”
Following the Parliament’s Strasbourg session, S&D member Emma Rafowicz spoke to our French member station euradio about all the many ways social media platforms can pose a threat – particularly in Europe.
Emma Rafowicz, Member of the European Parliament – S&D, France (in French):
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“What I am asking is that if these platforms do not comply with our laws, they should be banned on the European continent. […] I know that they are part of the lives of many citizens, but today they are also a danger. A danger to women, a danger to children, a danger – and this is no small matter – to our democracies… We saw the role played by Elon Musk’s platform X, particularly in the campaign of Alice Weidel, the candidate for the AFD, the far-right neo-Nazi party in Germany. We saw the role that TikTok played in disrupting the Romanian elections by favouring the far-right candidate. We see this everywhere across Europe. These platforms are being used by reactionary international forces to interfere in elections in Europe.”
On 19 January, Rafowicz and 53 other MEPs also wrote an open letter to the Commission calling for European alternatives to X. And rather coincidentally, the very next day, a brand new – and wholly European – social media network named ‘W’ was announced.
But what precisely does it mean for a social media network to call itself ‘European’? Our colleagues at The Europeans put this question to Nina Lamparski, deputy head of global digital investigations at AFP Fact Check, a branch of Agence France-Presse.
The experienced fact-checker, who is also a member of the Euranet Plus fact-checking team, explains.
Nina Lamparski, Digital Investigation Deputy Editor-in-Chief at Agence France-Presse (in English):
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“That means it’s built in Europe, hosted in Europe, governed by European rules, and importantly, not owned by Elon or any of the other US tech bros. […] And the aim of W is to basically fight disinformation instead of spreading it, which we know other platforms are really good at; to protect our data – another key point within the European space; and also to make sure that the users are real people, not anonymous or fake accounts. So that means you’ll have to provide a valid ID in order to sign up, which is very different from X, because X allows you – and even encourages you – to join without proving who you are. For Musk, the right to stay anonymous basically protects free speech. I’d argue that it just protects horrible people saying horrible things online.”
Lamparski has also done a bit of a background check on W. She tells The Europeans that it is owned by a Swedish climate action platform called We Don’t Have Time, which may be where the ‘W’ originally comes from – or it may just be that W comes before X in the alphabet!
Its CEO, a Swiss privacy and data protection expert called Anna Zeiter, has been dealing with AI and user data at eBay for more than a decade and has publicly declared that systemic disinformation is both eroding public trust and weakening democracies.
W also has an advisory board made up of former ministers and business figures, mostly from Sweden, but the people who work for it are scattered across Europe.
The platform is due to be rolled out, gradually, from March and it is anyone’s guess how it will fare. It could go either way, argues Lamparski.
Nina Lamparski, Digital Investigation Deputy Editor-in-Chief at Agence France-Presse (in English):
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“Some users might actually be reluctant to hand over their ID for verification precisely because they want to protect their data. And we all know of many hacking instances in the last few years, where millions of personal infos have been leaked. But then in light of current events – like Trump threatening to invade Greenland – leaving X may become a political, or even philosophical, choice for Europeans. It may not just be about audiences anymore. It may be about something much bigger than that: actually taking a stance.”
- Author: Joanna Neville, Euranet Plus News Agency
