It is the first sanction imposed by the Community Executive under the Digital Services Lawwhich forces technology giants to combat illegal products and content circulating on their platforms.
Brussels maintains that the blue mark offered by X in exchange for payment violates the prohibition of misleading design provided for in the Digital Services Law, given that makes it seem like there is a real verified user behind the beads with the blue mark.
“On X, anyone can pay to get ‘verified’ status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, which makes it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and the content with which they interact,” alleges the community Executive.
“This deception exposes users to scamsincluding identity theft fraud, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors,” Brussels maintains.
While the Digital Services Act does not require verification of users, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification was carried out, the Commission insists.
The sanction also includes two other illegal behaviors that the European Commission attributes to Elon Musk’s platform. First, X has breached the obligation to provide a public database that allows you to consult all the advertisements published on the platform.
This is especially important to analyze fraudulent political advertisements circulating, for example, in the context of elections, according to Brussels.
Finally, the American platform does not respect the obligation to allow researchers to analyze their data on a large scaleto study effects such as polarization or the diffusion of different types of content on the platform.
“Fool users with blue checkmarkshiding information about ads and excluding researchers have no place online in the EU,” said Commission Vice-President responsible for Digital Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen.
“With this first decision of non-compliance with the Digital Services Law, we hold X responsible for undermining user rights and evading accountability,” Virkkunen highlighted.
However, no political official from the European Commission wanted to explain the reasoning behind the fine at a press conference. A lack of accountability that has become common since Donald Trump’s return to the White Housewhom community leaders are afraid of angering.
The breakdown of the fine is as follows: 45 million for the blue mark, 40 million for data access difficulties and 35 million for the ad repository.
The total of 120 million is very far from the maximum penalty of 6% of annual turnover provided for by the Digital Services Law. Even so, the Community Executive maintains that it is a proportional and dissuasive fine.
In addition to paying this fine, Elon Musk’s platform now has a period of 60 days to correct their illegal behavior in these three areas.
Brussels maintains another investigation open against X, which was also launched in December 2023, in areas related to the dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures adopted to combat the manipulation of information. This file has not yet reached a successful conclusion.
In parallel, the community Executive has decided this Friday close without fines the case opened against TikTok for its ad repository. The reason is that the Chinese platform is committed to providing advertising repositories that guarantee complete transparency about the ads on its services.
“Since we detected that TikTok’s ad repository did not comply with the standards of the Digital Services Act, TikTok has presented a very comprehensive set of commitments that address our concerns“explain community sources.