X hit with $140 million fine from the EU
The European Commission has fined Elon Musk 120 million euros (about $140 million) for violating its transparency rules under the . The European Union’s executive branch said it was investigating the social media company’s blue check verification system last year – first introduced when it was still known as Twitter – as well as other alleged violations of the DSA. The news concerns the “misleading design” of the check mark, as well as “the lack of transparency of [X’s] advertising repository and failure to provide access to public data to researchers.
The Commission’s problem with X’s verification system is that where blue checkmarks were once something Twitter verified, they can now be purchased by anyone. According to the EU, this puts users at risk of scams and identity theft fraud because they cannot know whether the accounts they interact with are genuine. “While the DSA does not require user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified when such verification has not occurred,” he wrote in a statement.
The EU also ruled that X’s ad repository uses “design features and access barriers” that make it difficult for good faith actors and the general public to determine the source of online advertisements and detect scams or threat campaigns. It states that X fails to provide information relating to both the content of an ad and the entity paying for its placement.
The third alleged violation concerns public data that companies are required by the DSA to make available to qualified researchers. The European Commission says that X’s practices in this area are unnecessarily prohibitive, “thus compromising research into several systemic risks in the European Union.”
X dispose de 60 jours ouvrables pour répondre à la décision de non-conformité de l’UE – la première du genre – concernant les coches bleues, et de 90 jours pour soumettre un « plan d’action » sur la manière dont il traitera les violations présumées liées à son référentiel publicitaire et à l’accès aux données publiques. Failure to comply with these rules could result in financial penalties.
