EU Hits Elon Musk’s X With 120 Million Euro Fine For Breaching Bloc’s Social Media Law
LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for violating the bloc’s digital regulations, saying it could expose users to fraud and manipulation.
The European Commission announced its decision after the investigation it opened two years ago to X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as DSA.
The EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision for the first time since the DSA came into force. The comprehensive rulebook requires platforms to take greater responsibility for protecting European users and purging harmful or illegal content and products from their sites, under the threat of hefty fines.
The commission said it penalized X, formerly known as Twitter, for three separate breaches of the DSA’s transparency requirements. The decision could anger his administration, President Donald Trump. Attacked digital regulationsHe complained that Brussels was targeting US tech companies and vowed retaliation.
The company did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.
EU regulators had already made their accusations known when they published their charges in mid-2024. preliminary findings They started an investigation into X.
Regulators said X had blue check marks broke the rules Because it can expose users to fraud and manipulation due to “deceptive design practices.”
Before Musk acquired X, the checkmarks, known as Twitter, mirrored the verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts.
Then I bought it in 2022The site began distributing badges to anyone willing to pay $8 a month.
In its announcement, the Commission noted that X failed to meaningfully verify who was behind the account, “making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of the accounts and content with which they interact.”
Regulators said X also failed to meet transparency requirements for its advertising database.
Platforms in the EU are required to provide a database of details such as all the digital ads they carry, who paid for them and the target audience, to help researchers detect scams, fake ads and coordinated influence campaigns. However, the Commission said that X’s database was weakened by design features and access barriers such as “excessive delays in processing”.
Regulators also said that
“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, hiding information in ads and excluding researchers has no place online in the EU. The DSA protects users,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s vice president for technology sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement.
