EU hits Elon Musk's X with 120 million euro fine for breaching bloc's social media law

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LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation.

The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA.

It's the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.

The Commission said it was punishing X, previously known as Twitter, because of three different breaches of the DSA’s transparency requirements. The decision could rile President Donald Trump, whose administration has lashed out at digital regulations, complaining that Brussels was targeting U.S. tech companies and vowing to retaliate.

The company did not respond immediately to an email request for comment.

EU regulators had already outlined their accusations in mid-2024 when they released preliminary findings of their investigation into X.

Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because on “deceptive design practices” and could expose users to scams and manipulation.

Before Musk acquired X, when it was previously known as Twitter, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts.

After he bought it in 2022, the site started issuing the badges to anyone who wanted to pay $8 per month for one.

The means X does not meaningfully verify who's behind the account, “making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with,” the Commission said in its announcement.

X also fell short of the transparency requirements for its ad database, regulators said.

Platforms in the EU are required to provide a database of all the digital advertisements they have carried, with details such as who paid for them and the intended audience, to help researches detect scams, fake ads and coordinated influence campaigns. But X's database, the Commission said, is undermined by design features and access barriers such as "excessive delays in processing.”

Regulators also said X also puts up “unnecessary barriers” for researchers trying to access public data, which stymies research into systemic risks that European users face.

“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA protects users," Henna Virkkunen, the EU's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement.