Depending on who you talk to in Europe, Elon Musk is either a courageous champion of free speech hero or a petulant and dangerous troublemaker.

“He’s using his superpowers to say, ‘I’m going to give a voice to the voiceless.’ He’s a once-in-a-multigeneration human being. He’s my hero. He’s amazing,” said author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islam and former Dutch politician, on the podcast, Honestly.

According to Ian Hislop, editor of the British satirical newspaper Private Eye, Musk is “a classic social media adolescent who hasn’t grown up – the temper tantrums, the lack of responsibility.”

He recently told LBC radio in the United Kingdom that Musk is “riddled with contradictions, and at some point, I am hoping that even his followers will begin to notice that from sentence to sentence, he makes no sense.”

Musk, the tech billionaire who owns X and backed United States President Donald Trump, is at the centre of several debates in Europe having fanned British politics into a firestorm by amplifying attacks on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and platforming Germany’s far right.

At one point on X Musk asserted, “Starmer is evil.”

He threw his narrative-shaping powers behind an opposition Conservative campaign in the UK to reopen an inquiry into what it called a sexual abuse coverup by police and prosecutors.

The abusers in question, dubbed grooming gangs, were British men of Pakistani heritage who sexually assaulted white underage girls in towns across the Midlands in the late 1990s and 2000s.

After a Times investigation in 2013 into the scandal – that these organised criminal rings had operated for years without major police intervention, an inquiry followed.

Starmer refused to reopen the inquiry on the grounds that the Conservative and populist Reform parties sought only to feed a far-right, anti-immigrant hysteria, but Musk continued to assail him for “harbouring known terrorists”.

Musk falsely claimed that posting a meme critical of Starmer “could get you sent to prison in Britain”, and amplified claims by the right-wing news outlet GB News asserting, “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes.”

Musk rocks German politics

Musk is also busy meddling in German politics, in advance of a critical election next month that the governing Social Democrats are set to lose.

“My recommendation to the people of Germany is that you must vote for change. Voting for [the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland, or AfD] is simply the sensible and common sense move … Nothing outrageous is being proposed. Just common sense… only AfD can save Germany,” Musk asserted on X.

On January 9, he conducted an interview with AfD leader Alice Weidel, in which she recast Adolph Hitler’s Nazis as the forerunners not of her party, which sprang from the Neonazi movement, but of Germany’s Social Democrats.

“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite,” Weidel told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy … We are exactly the opposite. We are a libertarian conservative party. We are wrongly framed the entire time, and we would like to free the people.”

Within a week, the interview had been viewed 16 million times and sparked the envy of the leader of Germany’s Free Democrats.

“The most pathetic figure I have seen is Christian Lindner, writing to Musk saying, ‘Don’t support the AfD, support me because I am the true libertarian here in Germany,’” said Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, who heads the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

“European leaders are totally lost in the short-term issues. Who will vote for Christian Lindner after he has asked Musk to interfere in the German election?”

Weidel says she will release the energies of the German people to innovate and pursue enterprise, which in her view, is hampered by bureaucracy, over-regulation, over-taxation and immigration – positions identical to those of US President-elect Donald Trump, whom Musk also promoted on X.

Musk’s power through his social media site to shape what many people perceive to be the truth is causing deep concern on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a farewell speech to the American people on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden said, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy … I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex … Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation that enables the abuse of power.”

There are similar concerns in Europe that the inordinate sum Musk paid for Twitter – $44bn – which he renamed X, only made sense if it was to be recouped through influence.

“Musk is convinced … that the decision … to buy Twitter is a turning point in American history, and by doing that Musk saved American democracy,” said Torreblanca. “Otherwise, Democrats would have been in power forever,” he told Al Jazeera.

“He thinks it is now the time to promote this agenda globally, to fight progressives wherever they are.”

‘Very difficult to respond’

Digital experts place X’s penetration somewhere between 50 and 100 million users on the continent of 550 million people, but Musk’s reach is amplified through the news media and his influence on other platform owners.

Musk’s close alliance with Trump also creates the perception that he speaks for the president, and gives him power over his peers.

On January 7, Facebook and Instagram CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video saying, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech … we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X.”

This, says Torreblanca, means “something will be taken down only if another reader asks them to do so, which is basically to delegate to users the integrity and quality of the platform which is unacceptable to European legislation.”

Europe’s Digital Services Act makes it mandatory for platforms to moderate content because they are liable for content that is harmful or violent or offensive to different groups.

The overwhelming support the DSA has from a broad political spectrum – conservatives, socialists and Greens – means the EU can enforce it in a neutral and even-handed manner, said Torreblanca, avoiding the dramatic confrontation and ban imposed by Brazil last year.

“In practice, our competition authorities in the EU are autonomous to make investigations and fine [a] company,” said Torreblanca, “and I think the best way Europe should do this is in a politically impassionate way.”

The European Commission may be Europe’s only authority capable of standing up to Musk. The UK and Germany did not individually threaten X with a suspension or legal action. But even the Commission may be intimidated, said Giorgos Verdi, who works with the ECFR in Brussels.

“[Musk’s] new connections with Trump make it very difficult to respond,” Verdi told Al Jazeera. “Trump views the US tech champions as very important instruments when it comes to the trade war with China. If the EU forces those companies to slow down by following regulations, this could become a national security issue for the US.”

Musk may even be educating those focused on pushing Kremlin narratives, believed Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at Manchester University’s Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies.

“Russian influence operations are actually modelled on examples of Trump or Musk,” said Alyukov.

“They select certain incidents, like scandals in the UK … and then they try to present certain politicians as the solution to this problem. That is exactly what Musk does,” he told Al Jazeera.

Musk promoted the UK’s Reform Party as the solution to what he and the hard right often term “uncontrolled” immigration and gang rape.

Musk and Moscow both realised they needed dedicated ecosystems to normalise and disseminate their views, said Alyukov, who recently co-wrote a study of outlets Moscow funded in Europe, which pose as legitimate news services but release Russian messaging at key moments, such as elections.

“You don’t do outright censorship. You create a conducive ecosystem to making your voice heard, and what [Musk] did was he basically got himself an ecosystem,” Alyukov said.

Governments in uncharted waters

Musk has fused his companies’ interests with the state’s, making himself indispensable.

Space-X launches NASA’s payloads, Starlink provides the Pentagon with the largest global system of communications satellites, and Tesla disrupted a global car industry that had marginalised Detroit carmakers, bringing the US back to the fore.

X has now become the dominant global communications platform, and Musk is weaponising it against news media, telling followers, “X is the future, it’s citizen journalism … It’s by the people, for the people.”

That has set much of the newsgathering agenda, with newspapers scrambling to investigate whether a rumour on X is a story or a canard.

“I think he thought … ‘I can say anything I like, it doesn’t have to be true, it’s better if it’s not true, and no one will stop me,” said Hislop. “We’re in an era of total fatuity.”

“The economy has been geopoliticised,” said Verdi. “It’s not just about applying ethical principles to technology equally. It’s also about power.”