Věra Jourová, the EU’s outgoing Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency decided to show what true EU ‘values’ were with a ranting parting shot. True to form, she went on a moralizing rant against free speech—and a certain billionaire who holds it dear.
In an interview with Politico, published on Wednesday, October 16th, Jourová went as far as to brand Elon Musk, the owner of X, a “promoter of evil” just because he turned the platform formerly known as Twitter into one of the internet’s last remaining hubs of freedom of expression following years of insidious censorship tactics employed primarily against conservatives by the previous management.
Unlike other Silicon Valley tech bosses, Musk “is not able to recognize the difference between good and evil,” the Commissioner asserted. A more appropriate question would be whether she herself is able to differentiate between free speech and hate speech.
“We started to relativize evil, and [Musk] is helping it proactively. He is a promoter of evil,” Jourová said.
She explained that since big tech companies hold “monstrous” power over political and social narratives, she was “really scared” by enterprises that are in “bad hands.” Her prime example, of course, is X, which—according to Jourová—has become “the main hub for spreading antisemitism now,” something she warned EU countries about a day earlier.
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 … 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.
X has been in the crosshairs of EU regulators ever since it was purchased by Musk, but relations between the platform and the European Commission really began to deteriorate after the billionaire refused to sign up to the EU’s “voluntary” anti-disinformation pact like other social media giants. Brussels almost immediately found X’s content moderation falling short of EU rules, and initiated an ongoing non-compliance case against it.
In August, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton—the EU’s self-styled “digital enforcer” responsible for creating the bloc’s infamous social media censorship tool, the Digital Services Act (DSA)—went as far as to threaten Musk with further “legal repercussions” if he fails to censor Donald Trump and other political figures deemed of engaging in “hate speech.” Breton’s outburst came after Musk reinstated the former president’s account and conducted a two-hour-long interview with him, amassing 100 million views in 24 hours.
Following the public outrage against Breton’s undemocratic suggestion, the EU Commission immediately threw him under the bus, claiming that he acted alone, without authorization from Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. The episode probably contributed to Breton’s dramatic exit from the Commission the next month, after it was revealed that von der Leyen silently pressured French President Emmanuel Macron to drop Breton’s reappointment bid in favor of somebody else.
But Breton’s not the only one not returning to Brussels in the new mandate starting in a few weeks. Jourová’s entire portfolio—“Values and Transparency”—has been scrapped under von der Leyen’s new distribution plan. The commissioner is no longer a member of any party back in her native Czechia, meaning Jourová is unlikely to be nominated for another role.The transparency portfolio was not only redundant throughout the past five years—we already have a transparency watchdog in the office of the European Ombudsman, after all—but also quite counterproductive, given Jourová’s glaring hypocrisy and personal scandals in the area.
For instance, she’s still refusing to disclose key documents related to her 2023 trip to Slovenia, during which she may or may not have encouraged the local constitutional court to go ahead with the completely unconstitutional purge of conservatives from the country’s public broadcaster and near-entire media landscape.
Jourová also kept silent in the case of Pfizergate, failing to remind von der Leyen of the principles of transparency as she still refuses to disclose both the EU’s unlawfully redacted vaccine contracts and her mysteriously missing text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, despite being ordered to do so by both the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Ombudsman.
In short, Jourová’s portfolio was always about promoting very specific ‘values’ of one side of the political aisle over the other, while acting as one of the least transparent members of the European Commission. If this is the person who thinks Elon Musk is a “promoter of evil” for allowing free speech on his platform, then it’s probably best for Musk to just take it as a compliment.
