The European Commission (EC) has today reached a verdict on an investigation of X that started in 2024. The EC has fined the social network €120 million (approximately $140 million), finding that its blue checkmark was deceptive since it implies a user who has it is verified, but anyone can pay to obtain this status “without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account”.
This violates the obligation, under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), for online platforms to “prohibit deceptive design practices on their services”.
The fine also covers X’s advertisement repository failing to meet “the transparency and accessibility requirements of the DSA”, according to the EC’s press release. It further states that “accessible and searchable ad repositories are critical for researchers and civil society to detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, coordinated information operations and fake advertisements”.
X is said to incorporate “design features and access barriers, such as excessive delays in processing, which undermine the purpose of ad repositories”. The repository also lacks critical information like the content and topic of the ad, as well as the legal entity paying for it.
Finally, X is also on the hook for failing to provide researchers with access to its public data, which is another requirement of the DSA. X’s terms of service prohibit eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, including through scraping. X’s processes for researchers’ access to public data “impose unnecessary barriers, effectively undermining research into several systemic risks in the EU”, the EC goes on to say.
X has 60 working days to inform the EC of “specific measures” it intends to take to bring its infringement of the DSA to an end, relating to the blue checkmark, and 90 days for the ad repository and access to public data for researchers. The EC’s Board of Digital Services will then have one month from the receipt of X’s action plan to give an opinion, and after that the EC itself will have another month to give its final decision and “set a reasonable implementation period”.
