Elon Musk’s social media platform X, previously Twitter, has been fined €120m (£105m) by the EU after it discovered rule breaches had left customers susceptible to scams and manipulation.
The European Fee began investigating X below the Digital Companies Act (DSA) two years in the past and has now issued its first non-compliance resolution towards the positioning.
In a choice that would anger the US President Donald Trump the fee censured Elon Musk’s platform for 3 completely different breaches of DSA transparency necessities.
Picture:
Elon Musk with U.S. President Donald Trump within the Oval Workplace.
Pic: Reuters
The Trump administration has beforehand criticised Brussels’ digital rules, saying that they aim US tech corporations and had vowed to retaliate.
Certainly one of X’s breaches highlighted by the EU involved the “deceptive design practices” of the platform’s blue checkmarks, which uncovered customers to scams and manipulation, regulators mentioned.
Earlier than Mr Musk acquired the positioning for $44bn (£33bn) in 2022, the checkmarks indicated the accounts of notable customers with verified identities.
Below the tech billionaire’s adjustments, nevertheless, the badge could possibly be purchased by anybody keen to pay $8 (£6) a month.
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How Elon Musk’s X is boosting the British proper.
The fee mentioned, it was subsequently “difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with”.
X additionally fell in need of transparency necessities for its database of ads, regulators mentioned.
Within the EU, platforms are required to offer a database of all of the digital adverts they’ve carried, with particulars resembling who paid for them and the meant viewers.
However the fee mentioned X had created “access barriers” to its database, which lacked “critical information” and imposed “excessive delays in processing, which undermine the purpose of ad repositories”.
Picture:
Elon Musk’s profile on X, with the blue checkmark displayed. Pic: AP
It additionally discovered X had failed to satisfy its DSA obligations to offer researchers with its public knowledge, the fee mentioned.
The EU’s government vice-president for tech sovereignty, safety and democracy, Henna Virkkunen, mentioned: “Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU.
“The DSA protects customers. The DSA provides researchers the best way to uncover potential threats. The DSA restores belief within the on-line surroundings.
“With the DSA’s first non-compliance decision, we are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability.”
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X now has 60 working days to tell the fee of the way it will carry its blue checkmarks into compliance, and 90 days to deal with the opposite two breaches.
The fee says it could possibly impose “periodic penalty payments” on Musk’s platform if it fails to conform.
