The European Commission (EC) today reached a decision on the investigation into X starting in 2024. The EC has fined the social network €120 million (about $140 million), finding that its blue checkmark is a verified account, but anyone can pay to verify “without the company being able to verify who is behind the account.”
This violates the obligation under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) for online platforms to “prohibit fraudulent design practices on their services”.
According to the EC’s press release, the fine also covers the failure of X’s ad inventory to meet the “transparency and accessibility requirements of the DSA”. It added that “accessible and searchable ad repositories are important for researchers and civil society to detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, integrated information operations and fraudulent advertising”.
X is said to include “design features and barriers to access, such as excessive processing delays, that undermine the purpose of ad collections”. The repository also lacks important information such as the content and title of the ad, as well as the legal entity that paid for it.
Finally, X is also on the hook for failing to provide researchers with access to its public data, another DSA requirement. X’s terms of service prohibit qualified researchers from freely accessing its public data, including through scraping. X’s actions “impose unnecessary barriers to researchers’ access to public data, effectively undermining research into several systemic risks in the EU”, the EC said.
X has 60 working days to communicate the “specific steps” it intends to take to end the DSA violation, related to the blue checkmark, and 90 days for researchers to access ad collections and public data. The EC’s Board of Digital Services will have one month to provide feedback on the X’s action plan, and then the EC itself will have another month to make its final decision and set an “appropriate implementation period”.
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