The hearing wasn’t halfway through when the chairman walked away.

Before his second cup of coffee, Jonathan Liedl discovered he was going viral. The academic did not understand. His niche Catholic conversations had attracted a small following over the years, but most days, his corner of the Internet remained a quiet one. Wading through the sudden flood of notifications, he found his answer: “Oh, the vice president of the United States just replied to my tweet.”

On the eve of a highly-anticipated live X “Spaces” conversation between Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, the powerful European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in August that authorities would be “monitoring” the conversation for “content that may incite violence, hate, and racism.”