“I’m really scared by digital platforms in bad hands,” Věra Jourová tells POLITICO.
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Elon Musk is a ‘promoter of evil,’ EU rule-of-law chief says
“I’m really scared by digital platforms in bad hands,” Věra Jourová tells POLITICO.
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Elon Musk has been on a collision course with European officials, fighting regulators and governments on multiple fronts. | Apu Gomes/Getty Images
October 16, 2024 3:13 pm CET
By
Sam Clark and
Barbara Moens
BRUSSELS — Elon Musk, unlike other tech bosses, "is not able to recognize good and evil,” a European Union top official said Wednesday.
The multibillionaire tech mogul and boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX is amplifying hatred, outgoing European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová told POLITICO in an interview, calling him a “promoter of evil.”
Musk has been on a collision course with European officials, fighting regulators and governments on multiple fronts. The tech mogul bought Twitter in April 2022, rebranding it as X shortly after, and he has attracted criticism for his management of the platform, with European politicians and civil society saying he has allowed hate speech to fester on the site.
“We started to relativize evil, and he's helping it proactively. He's the promoter of evil,” Jourová said.
The Czech politician, who was the EU’s justice chief from 2014-2019 and has been in charge of “values and transparency” since 2019, has had regular contact with many of the world’s largest technology companies over the last decade on issues like privacy, disinformation and content moderation.
Big tech companies have “monstrous power in their hands,” Jourová said. “I'm really scared by digital platforms in bad hands."
X is “the main hub for spreading antisemitism now,” Jourová said, adding that she warned ministers from EU capitals on Tuesday to be vigilant to the possibility of online antisemitism spilling over into the real world.
“Now we are in the situation where the member states’ law enforcement powers have to protect the people who are under threat, under physical threat,” she said. “This is what I mean ... This new chapter, new intensity of antisemitism, where we don't see sufficient action from the side of the platforms.”
Jourová has never met Musk in person, but said that “even without this personal meeting, I would say that out of all the bosses I met, he is the only one who is not able to recognize good and evil.”
The EU’s former internal market chief Thierry Breton did meet Musk in California in 2022, and
since clashed with him publicly over Musk’s approach to online content moderation.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
Regulation vs. innovation
Jourová also dismissed the increasingly popular narrative that Brussels' overregulation has stifled tech innovation.
The EU passed a raft of digital legislation over the last five years, leading some of the world’s largest technology companies to
argue that they cannot launch AI tools and other innovative products in the bloc because they don’t know how the new laws work together or how they will be enforced.
But innovation for innovation’s sake is not necessarily desirable, Jourová said: “We have to be sure that the innovations are developed to do good to people.”
She said she wondered why innovation was typically "described as something absolutely good, [and] regulations as something which is bad … It's not black and white."
Big tech companies’ vast profits should not be at the expense of Europeans, Jourová said — even if that means product-launch delays. “Nobody says that Google and others cannot introduce new technologies in Europe. Maybe, one, two months, half a year later than somewhere else, but we want to be sure,” she said.
Jourová led work on the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a landmark privacy regime that went into force in 2018 and remains one of the EU’s most famous — and infamous — laws.
Though the EU recently passed the
Artificial Intelligence Act, the
Digital Services Act and the
Digital Markets Act, the GDPR often remains the main target of tech companies' ire, particularly because of how it is interpreted. The question of whether the law will need to be changed in the next five years is a key issue for incoming Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen, Jourová said.
“I think in [terms of] GDPR, we will have to look again at how to better enforce under the principle of one continent, one law,” she said.
Jourová, who is leaving Brussels after 10 years at the Berlaymont, joked that she was returning to Prague as a “dissident,” given she left her own ANO party, which has turned more illiberal under former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.
The return of the Euroskeptic Babiš, who is currently
leading the polls ahead of next year's Czech election, would strengthen the illiberal forces in the EU, given Babiš’ ties to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Jourová dismissed rumors that she would start her own political movement to take on her former boss. Instead, she will return to her alma mater, Charles University in Prague, in a management and teaching role.
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