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.
Today, X still prominently advertises that paying for checks is the only way to “verify” an account on the platform. But the Commission, which has been investigating X since 2023, concluded that “X’s use of the ‘blue checkmark’ for ‘verified accounts’ deceives users.”
This violates the DSA as the “deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors,” the commission wrote.
Interestingly, the commission concluded that X made it harder to identify bots, despite Musk’s professed goal to eliminate bots being a primary reason he bought Twitter. Perhaps validating the EU’s concerns, X recently received backlash after changing a feature that accidentally exposed that some of the platform’s biggest MAGA influencers were based “in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes,” Futurism reported.
Although the DSA does not mandate the verification of users, “it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place,” the commission said. X now has 60 days to share information on the measures it will take to fix the compliance issue.
X’s fine also included DSA violations due to the lack of transparency and accessibility of its ad repository. The DSA requires platforms to make certain details about ads public so that researchers and users can “detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, coordinated information operations, and fake advertisements.”
Rather than making that information accessible, X apparently was guilty of “excessive delays in processing” when researchers sought access. And once the data was shared, X excluded “critical information”—”such as the content and topic of the advertisement, as well as the legal entity paying for it.”
That makes it harder to determine who’s paying for what ads. In the context of election ads, X’s failures risked obscuring the origins of false or misleading claims in ad campaigns, EuroNews reported.
Along similar lines, X was fined for failing “to provide researchers with access to the platform’s public data. Musk controversially shut down free access to data in February 2023, immediately prompting warnings that X was hindering research. By the end of that year, more than 100 researchers confirmed that they stopped studying X, affecting studies tracking hate speech, child safety, and misinformation. Those researchers weren’t just complaining about access but were also afraid that Musk might sue them for reporting anything negative about the platform.
X has 90 days to tell the Commission how it will improve issues with its ads repository and research access, but Musk is seemingly already signaling intent to sue.
EU expects X to fight fine
Musk has not directly commented on the fine, but Vice President JD Vance reacted to rumors by prematurely blasting the decision as EU censorship on X.
“Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship,” Vance wrote. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”
Vance and Trump have long criticized the EU’s stricter regulations of big tech as singling out American companies and attempting to censor Americans, Reuters noted. On Friday, Musk reposted criticism of the EU fine from a lawyer, Preston Byrne, who quoted Vance’s X post and suggested that Congress should act “ASAP” to pass a law that he proposed. If passed, that law “would allow X to sue the European Commission in US federal court for three times this amoun and get injunctive relief against the Commission’s orders.”
The commission seemingly expects that X will fight the fine. An EU official told EuroNews that the conclusion of this investigation into X—which is one of several that remain ongoing—was delayed over two years “primarily by the Commission’s goal to build a strong legal case anticipating that X will likely pursue a lawsuit to counter the findings.”
X did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But as X plots its response, it seems likely that the Trump administration may attempt to intervene. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has already demanded that the EU overhaul its tech regulations if it wants a 50 percent tariff rate on steel products reduced. Unlike some tariffs, which the Supreme Court is mulling reversing, the steel tariffs are not facing legal challenges and remain a US bargaining chip as EU negotiations continue.
Whether X could succeed in litigation remains unclear, as that would be the first test of pushback against the DSA. The commission’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, seems confident that the fine will not be ruled as improper censorship. She emphasized on Friday that X received only a “modest fine” that “was proportionate and calculated,” based on legitimate fears the non-compliance could expose EU users to risks, Reuters reported.
“I think it’s very important to underline that DSA is having nothing to do with censorship,” Virkkunen said.
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