© Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
© Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
With the US threatening to support ‘patriotic’ parties here, we need better defences, starting with tough new rules about political donations
The new threat is so dizzyingly bizarre that Europe, and especially Britain, is slow to believe it. The US declares itself our enemy. Europe emerges as its main adversary in the US national security strategy. Russia is its friend, not us. Everything that looked solid since the second world war is turned upside down; the land of the free becomes the destroyer of democratic values. Appeasement fails.
He may ramble, but Donald Trump speaks plainly. He means what he says, and he hates everything European. Except its emerging “patriotic” parties, which he wants to support. His strategy warns of “civilizational erasure”, claiming Europe will soon “become majority non-European” and parroting the racist conspiracy known as the great replacement theory. Describing Europeans as “weak”, “decaying” and “destroying their countries”, with “real stupid” leaders, Trump responded to the question of whether they would still be allies, in a Politico interview, with a hint of threat: “It depends.”
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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© Photograph: Twitter
© Photograph: Twitter
© Photograph: Twitter
President Nayib Bukele entrusting chatbot known for calling itself ‘MechaHitler’ to create ‘AI-powered’ curricula
Elon Musk is partnering with the government of El Salvador to bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country, according to a Thursday announcement by xAI. Over the next two years, the plan is to “deploy” the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an “AI-powered education program”.
xAI’s Grok is more known for referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and espousing far-right conspiracy theories than it is for public education. Over the past year, the chatbot has spewed various antisemitic content, decried “white genocide” and claimed Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
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© Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
© Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
© Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
A Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet” since X has allegedly abandoned them.
“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”
If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)
© Getty Images | Anadolu Agency
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Evoke decides to undertake a review of the Company’s strategic options
European stock markets are mostly in the red this morning, as defence company stocks fall.
Shares in German automotive and arms manufacturer Rheinmetall are down 3.3%, UK weapons maker BAE System has dropped by 1.27%, and Italian defence firm Leonardo has lost 2.2%.
Mainland European equity markets are heading lower in a day that will be dominated by monetary policy out of the Americas.
Notably, the defence sector has particularly suffered this morning, with the likes of BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, and Thales lose traction as the end of the Russia-Ukraine war comes into sight. Unfortunately for Europe, the peace agreement appears to be a deal Trump has formed with Russia behind the back of European leaders whom the President has labelled “weak”.
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© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
The European Commission slapped social networking company X with a €120 million ($140 million) fine last week for what it says was a lack of transparency with its European users.
The fine, the first ever penalty under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, addressed three specific violations with allocated penalties.
The first was a deceptive blue checkmark system. X touted this feature, first introduced by Musk when he bought Twitter in 2022, as a way to verify your identity on X. However, the Commission accused it of failing to actually verify users. It said:
“On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified’ status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with.”
The company also blocked researchers from accessing its public data, the Commission complained, arguing that it undermined research into systemic risks in the EU.
Finally, the fine covers a lack of transparency around X’s advertising records. Its advertising repository doesn’t support the DSA’s standards, the Commission said, accusing it of lacking critical information such as advertising topic and content.
This makes it more difficult for researchers and the public to evaluate potential risks in online advertising according to the Commission.
Before Musk took over Twitter and renamed it to X, the company would independently verify select accounts using information including institutional email addresses to prove the owners’ identities. Today, you can get a blue checkmark that says you’re verified for $8 per month if you have an account on X that has been active for 30 days and can prove you own your phone number. X killed off the old verification system, with its authentic, notable, and active requirement, on April 1, 2023.
The tricky thing about weaker verification measures is that people can abuse them. Within days of Musk announcing the new blue checkmark verifications, someone registered a fake account for pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and tweeted “insulin is free now”, tanking the stock over 4%.
Other impersonators verifying fake accounts at the time targeted Tesla, Trump, and Tony Blair, among others.
Weak verification measures are especially dangerous in an era where fake accounts are rife. Many people have fallen victim to fake social media accounts that scammers set up to impersonate legitimate brands’ customer support.
Musk, who threatened a court battle when the EC released its preliminary findings on the investigation last year, confirmed that X deactivated the EC’s advertising account in retaliation, but also called for the abolition of the EU.
This isn’t the social media company’s first tussle with regulators. In May 2022, before Musk bought it, Twitter settled with the FTC and DoJ for $150 million over allegations that it used peoples’ non-public security numbers for targeted advertising.
There are also other ongoing DSA-related investigations into X. The EU is probing its recommendation system. Ireland is looking into its handling of customer complaints about online content.
X has 60 working days to address the checkmark violations and 90 days for advertising and researcher access, although given Musk’s previous commentary we wouldn’t be surprised to see him take the EU to court.
Failure to comply would trigger additional periodic penalties. The DSA allows fines up to 6% of global revenue.
Meanwhile, the core problem persists: anyone can still buy a ‘verified’ checkmark from X with extremely weak verification. So if anyone with a blue checkmark contacts you on the platform, don’t take their authenticity for granted.
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Elon Musk’s X became the first large online platform fined under the European Union’s Digital Services Act on Friday.
The European Commission announced that X would be fined nearly $140 million, with the potential to face “periodic penalty payments” if the platform fails to make corrections.
A third of the fine came from one of the first moves Musk made when taking over Twitter. In November 2022, he changed the platform’s historical use of a blue checkmark to verify the identities of notable users. Instead, Musk started selling blue checks for about $8 per month, immediately prompting a wave of imposter accounts pretending to be notable celebrities, officials, and brands.
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After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”
Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.
As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.
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In February 2025, it was found that Grok 3's system prompt contained an instruction to "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation." Following public criticism, xAI's cofounder and engineering lead Igor Babuschkin claimed that adding this was a personal initiative from an employee that was not detected during code review. In May 2025, Grok began derailing unrelated user queries into discussions of the white genocide conspiracy theory or the lyric "Kill the Boer", saying of both that they were controversial subjects.[95][96][97][98] In one response to an unrelated question about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Grok mentioned that it had been "instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated". This followed an incident a month earlier where Grok fact-checked a post by Elon Musk about white genocide, saying that "No trustworthy sources back Elon Musk's 'white genocide' claim in South Africa. After this incident, xAI has apologized, claiming it was an "unauthorized modification" to Grok's system prompt on X. Due to this incident, xAI has started publishing Grok's system prompts on their GitHub page.
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