Civil servants and public bodies need to stop posting on X as Europe looks to depend less on American tech platforms and develop homegrown competitors, former EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in an interview.
As European regulators confront X over its AI tool Grok, which allowed users to create images of women and children undressed, Vestager said government-run institutions need to abandon the platform.
Vestager joined a chorus of critics bashing X over the AI-generated explicit images, including Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. However, when the commission’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, issued her warning Monday to the website formerly known as Twitter, she posted her statement on X.
Vestager, who left the European Commission in 2024, said policymakers have multiple levers they can pull to chip away at X’s popularity among European users.
“We can change this,” she said.
The European approach to unseat X needs to be multipronged: Regulators should enforce existing laws while companies create alternatives to the Elon Musk-owned platform. Vestager pointed to the EU’s content moderation and platform transparency law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), as one tier of the legislative groundwork that regulators should draw on.
“When people talk about digital sovereignty, you know, first things, enforce the laws we have,” she said.
A commission spokesperson said last week that the enforcer had already sent X a request for information about Grok and ordered the platform to retain internal documentation of the AI tool’s features until the end of the year. The EU executive still has an open DSA investigation into X.
Regulators need to put a stop to the naked and sexualized images on Grok, Vestager said. But going up against X will require more than just enforcing the DSA. “A full bouquet” of regulators including privacy authorities could pile on to tackle the “vicious” problem posed by Grok, she said.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Indoor smoking a useful analogy. Shifting away from American tech platforms will be tough, in part because there are few European alternatives, Vestager said. Indoor smoking is an analogous problem in more ways than one. Once widespread, it is now outlawed in much of Europe – and smoking, like tech platforms, changes the brain and becomes addictive, she said. “The European alternatives are not big nor visible. It is not that they do not exist,” she stressed.
The public backlash against X comes amid rising transatlantic tensions. The platform terminated the commission’s ad account after the enforcer dealt X a €120 million DSA fine in December.
Weeks after the commission hit X with the fine, the U.S. State Department barred several civil society group leaders and one of the law’s architects, former commissioner Thierry Breton, from entering the country, accusing them of “censorship crackdowns.”
Those restrictions were “unprecedented, because a travel ban is something that you do with oligarchs supporting the war in Ukraine,” Vestager told The Capitol Forum. In the case of her former colleague and the other subjects of the U.S. travel ban, she said, “you’re talking about people who just did their job in enforcing democratically adopted laws – so obviously unacceptable.”
The move followed months of retaliation threats from the Trump administration in response to the EU’s DSA enforcement, which Republican leaders in the U.S. describe as stifling free speech. U.S. politicians on the right have also taken aim at the DSA’s sister law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is built on past Big Tech antitrust cases and mostly targets American technology giants. The tensions come as European officials are pushing back on Trump’s assertions that the U.S. could acquire Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, while trying to work with the U.S. on a deal to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The commission has plenty of outstanding digital cases that are sure to further inflame relations with Washington. Google could soon face fines in two DMA probes and Apple (AAPL) in another, and the iPhone maker also risks periodic penalties in a DMA case that led to a €500 million fine last year. Platforms subject to the DSA including Meta’s (META) Facebook and Instagram collectively faced five sets of preliminary charges last year that could lead to fines if the companies don’t make changes to comply.
Vestager’s successor is standing firm. Teresa Ribera, the current competition commissioner, said she’s not altering her U.S. travel plans in response to questions about Breton’s travel ban.
“I count on keeping my agenda to the United States,” she told reporters Tuesday.
