Elon Musk has managed to destroy X on his own

 

Leader  

 

Elon Musk 

Elon Musk has managed to destroy X on his own  

 

Risks high fines for fake news about the attack on Israel  

Rasmus Hanson  

Aftonbladet's editorial page is independent social democratic. 

 

Published 4:00 p.m 

 

Elon Musk has turned his own platform into a hellhole. Photo: Michel Euler / AP  

 

Elon Musk has single-handedly managed to destroy X, formerly Twitter. Although the platform has always had problems with anonymous trolls, it has been a place for debate and conversation. Journalists, politicians and ordinary people have easily been able to gather to bump and wet ideas against each other.  

But the platform's status as some kind of democratic meeting place has been completely erased since Musk's takeover.  

 

After Hamas's attack on Israel last Saturday, the amount of material spread on X exploded. Fake news, old footage used for shady purposes, and illegal material spread like wildfire.  

 

Something that caused the European Commission to react. 

  

The EU requires clarity  

 

On Tuesday,Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for the internal market, wrote an open letter in which he announced that X must review the material being spread and clean up the platform. Otherwise, you risk being fined six percent of your global turnover. 

 

In the letter, Breton demanded that Musk be transparent and clear about what type of content is allowed on the platform. Although the tone of voice has often been harsh on X, conversations have been able to be held. And there have been certain rules of the game to live by.  

 

Hellhole X  

 

But X has developed into a hellhole completely taken over by anonymous right-wing trolls. Ordinary people flee the platform. Some seek refuge on the platform Bluesky, which can almost be described as a Twitter copy. 

 

The latest in the line of all the brilliant ideas Musk has come up with is removing headers in links shared on X. Nowadays, when someone shares a link, it just looks like an image is shared.  

 

The motive for the change is probably quite simple. Musk wants journalists to buy a subscription to X, which enables you to write posts of any length, and create your own content on the platform instead of publishing links from established media. 

 

Megalomaniacal multibillionaire  

 

The goal is a super platform where material that only Musk likes can be spread. That the outcome would be something else when a megalomaniac multi-billionaire buys up a platform to keep as his toy is perhaps not surprising.  

 

But still, it's damn sad.