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The EU has just scored a double whammy against itself as yet another letter sent to Elon Musk blows up in its face. Just recently an official working in its highest echelons sent a warning letter to the billionaire pointing out that his social media platform X needs to moderate some of the content it’s allowing to be posted. The letter, written by Thierry Breton, the EU’s Internal Market commissioner in charge of enforcing the draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), insisted that Musk had an obligation to censor potentially “harmful content” on his platform.

But what is “harmful” content in the view of the EU? In real terms, the harmful content which is spooking the European Commission is from far-right groups – as Brussels sees these groups and their expansion as an existential threat and believes they need to be silenced. Musk, since taking over Twitter and rebranding it simply X, has allowed a number of these activists and organisations the freedom of expression believing that it is important to allow all political voices to have a platform to spout whatever they want.

The Commission seems to be setting itself up for a huge fall with Musk determined to expose it and its dirty games it plays with huge corporations – in a bid to control more and more of the information that social media platforms circulate. The EU wants to police the internet and, like the U.S., has a series of new rules in place which will effectively allow it to shut down those on social media whose content does not correspond with its own narrative.

Yet this letter from Breton is not the first and it would appear that the European Commission has a fatal attraction to Musk who seems hell-bent on humiliating Brussels in the months to come.

In July, Breton announced that the European Commission considered X to be in violation of the DSA and claimed it was poised to his X with massive fines unless it agreed to restrictions on “hate speech” and “misinformation.”

According to Musk, there was a dirty deal on offer by the Commission.

“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” Musk wrote in response. “The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”

Breton vocally denied the existence of such an offer, but Musk replied he was looking forward to “a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.”

These two letters show that the European Commission considers both Trump and far-right groups on X to be a major obstacle to its ambitions and even its longer-term stability. Presently, the European Commission is frantically backpedalling and carrying out a face-saving operation as if it were to be established that doing such dirty deals in smoke-filled rooms with huge U.S. firms was the norm, the fallout and damage to the EU’s reputation could be immeasurable, perhaps prompting a mass resignation of all its commissioners like in 1999 when they had to resign under a cloud of corruption allegations. Some may argue that Ursula von der Leyen is also inept for not even being in the loop about the French letters but few would be shocked to learn that she has an ephemeral control of the Commission even on a good day and perhaps it was a blessing that she was kept out of the spotlight, given that she has her fair share of graft allegations and cases pending against her.