Let’s leave X

Last Friday, the European Commission announced the imposition of a fine of 120 million euros on X (formerly Twitter) for three violations of the Digital Services Regulation. One of these violations is the end of Twitter’s verification system. Before tycoon Elon Musk took over the platform for $44 billion, Twitter gave blue badges to relevant people and institutions so that users knew if the person or institution was saying something was the real person or institution or a fraud. Musk decided to give the blue badge to whoever paid for it. This, the Commission has resolved, is confusing the consumer and opening the door to scams of different kinds. The other sanctions are for not opening the advertising repositories (preventing knowing, among other things, who places an ad on the platform) and for preventing tinkering with X’s statistics, which makes it impossible to know, for example, if the number of active users that the company sells is true or even plausible.

So far, everything is in order. But a few hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected the sanction in his X account. On Saturday it was Musk’s own turn. On his X account, he said that “the European Union must be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.” All of this coincides with the presentation of the new National Security Strategy of the United States, in which Washington aims to reverse the “decadence” of the continent by supporting the seizure of power by far-right and anti-EU forces.

In summary: Musk and the United States Government are allied in a common objective, which is to destroy the European Union and for the countries of the continent, alone, dwarfed and weakened, to give in one by one to their vision of the world.

Given this, what does Europe plan to do? The response of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski, has been highly celebrated, responding to Musk “Go to Mars. There is no censorship of Nazi salutes there”, in reference to the Roman-style arm that the tycoon has exhibited on more than one occasion. But where some see a triumph of ingenuity, I see a failure.

Musk’s strength, where the South African places all his hopes, is X and its informative relevance. A relevance that derives not from its number of users (permanently decreasing) but from the dependence that institutions, politicians and the media have on the platform. And it is a justified dependency. For better or worse, the political language of our time has been created on Twitter, as have entire careers in politics, both behind and in front of the cameras. It is not something, they say, that can be abandoned overnight.

But no more proof is needed. Elon Musk is using X to destroy the European project. And he’s not holding back in that process: The latest, allegations that the platform is deleting “community notes”—comments that Musk claims are better than independent fact-checking—that contradict the mogul’s worldview. Every day that passes in which institutions legitimize X with their presence is one more day in which Musk succeeds in his anti-European enterprise. There is no time to waste anymore. If we want the survival of the Union, if we want to continue defending a project of peace, prosperity, democracy, tolerance and freedom, let it be on the ground where we set the rules. Let’s leave X. Everyone. Now.

Fuente: https://elpais.com/opinion/2025-12-09/vayamonos-de-x.html