Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive of Tesla, completed his acquisition of Twitter on Friday ( 28^th October), and tweeted: “the bird is freed”.

In response, Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, said in a tweet: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”

The European Commission is preparing to enforce its Digital Services Act (DSA), which will regulate the responsibility of actors operating in the online world and includes provisions for the removal of illegal content including hate speech.

Writing in a post addressed to ‘Twitter advertisers’ shared on the platform last week, Musk said he had acquired Twitter to have a “common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner” but said the platform “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences”.