> Elon’s first official acknowledgement on Twitter of his new toy post-deal close was a tweet reading simply “the bird is freed.” This was quickly rejoined by European Commission Internet Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who responded with a reminder that freedom isn’t free.
> Notably, Breton has previously met with Musk in person and even recorded a video in which he says that he explained to Musk the EU’s Digital Services Act, and in which Musk basically says he’s aligned to everything it contains.
Wikipedia summarizes the DSA as so:
> The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation to modernise the e-Commerce Directive regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act
And later,
> The DSA proposal maintains the current rule according to which companies that host other's data are not liable for the content unless they actually know it is illegal, and upon obtaining such knowledge do not act to remove it.[15] This so-called "conditional liability exemption" is fundamentally different[16][17] from the broad immunities given to intermediaries under the equivalent rule ("Section 230 CDA") in the United States.
> In addition to the liability exemptions, the DSA would introduce a wide-ranging set of new obligations on platforms, including some that aim to disclose to regulators how their algorithms work, while other obligations would create transparency on how decisions to remove content are taken and on the way advertisers target users.
That Musk agrees (or at least did agree) to essentially everything in here suggests that a good chunk of the work going forward will be around policing "illegal" content.
In this light, the last point in the TechCrunch article sounds a little ominous:
> One of Musk’s first big leadership decisions appears to be to install a content moderation council that will help decide matters like who gets banned on the platform and for what — similar to Facebook’s Oversight Board.
> Twitter does already have a trust and safety council that acts in an advisory capacity, but that’s a large group that seems to act more behind the scenes to inform product decisions, whereas this would be a ‘Supreme Court’ of sorts for decisions on who gets to tweet and what in cases of controversy.