Embedded in the DSA is a theory about what X actually is. It treats platforms like X as communications infrastructure where speech happens, and the platform is conceptualised as a singular place, mostly neutral, with certain obligations for moderation and transparency attached. It views platforms as companies that are capitalistic in a textbook understanding of capitalistic companies: entities with the goal profit maximalisation, that are responsive to legal and economic incentives. This place can be regulated properly via transparency and via a set of complex process requirements. The platform companies that run these places will then implement these requirements as they are incentivised to do so via legal and economic pressures. The DSA’s approach follows from this understanding: establish transparency requirements, ensure researcher access, and prohibit deceptive design practices.

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X under Musk’s leadership operates in a manner that the architects of the DSA clearly did not account for however. Musk’s X is a major platform operated primarily as a political vehicle rather than a profit-maximizing business. There is little in Musk’s behaviour that indicates that commercial optimisation of X is his priority, from haphazardly gutting the workforce to alienating major advertisers, and altering the algorithm to favour right-wing speech. This resulted in cratering ad revenue for X. Musk’s choices do not make sense from the perspective of a business textbook, but do make sense if you understand the platform as Musk’s personal project, with changes made haphazardly and erratically to suit his needs. That his demands and ideas can instantly switch between petty and personal to strategic promotion of Musk’s affiliation with nazi ideology, is a further indication that the incentives of the platform are vastly different than what the DSA assumes.

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Where the EC treats X as a communications network, Musk understands intuitively that X is something more than that, although he does not spell it out explicitly. Social networking platforms are collective sense making tools. Social networking platforms, whether that’s X, Instagram or TikTok, are platforms that we use to shape our common knowledge, and to determine which political opinions are currently in-vogue. These platforms are used to create a shared reality. This goes from how TikTok and Instagram influencers can push Dubai Chocolate into a global hype, to how the conversations on X shape what’s inside the political Overton window. The algorithmic feeds actively shape which voices get amplified, which narratives spread, and which facts feel established. Henry Farrell summarises the problem as: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The fundamental power of platforms like X comes from its ownership over the tools to shape the collective understandings of the public, and allows them to be malformed in favour of fascism.

Viewing platforms like X exclusively through the lens of a communications network, without taking into account how the platform affects collective knowledge, leads to two problems, both on the individual level and on the political level. This misunderstanding operates at both the individual and regulatory level.

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