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Marrakech – The European Union has charged X, formerly known as Twitter, with engaging in deceptive practices and failing to comply with the bloc’s new social media regulations, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
These preliminary findings, announced by the European Commission on Friday, mark the first charges against a tech company since the DSA took effect, according to the Associated Press.
One of the main issues highlighted by the EU is X’s blue checkmark system, which the Commission claims constitutes “dark patterns” that can be used by malicious actors to deceive users.
Before Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform, blue checkmarks were largely reserved for verified celebrities, politicians, and influential accounts.
However, under Musk’s ownership, anyone can now purchase a blue checkmark for $8 per month, which the EU argues negatively affects users’ ability to make informed decisions about the authenticity of accounts and content.
The Commission also accused X of failing to comply with ad transparency rules, which require platforms to maintain a searchable and reliable database of all digital advertisements they have carried.
The EU stated that X’s ad database has design features and access barriers that make it unfit for its intended purpose of transparency.
Furthermore, the EU alleged that X falls short in providing researchers with access to public data, a requirement under the DSA to allow scrutiny of how platforms work and how online risks evolve.
Read also: X Unveils New ‘Thumbs Down’ Feature for Reply Disapproval
The Commission noted that researchers cannot independently access data by scraping it from the site, and the process to request access through an interface appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their projects or forces them to pay high fees.
In response to these accusations, Musk claimed that the European Commission offered X an “illegal secret deal” to censor speech without informing anyone, which he says X refused while other platforms accepted.
The EU’s investigation into X is ongoing, with regulators still examining the platform’s efforts to curb the spread of illegal content and combat information manipulation.
X now has the opportunity to respond to the accusations and make changes to comply with the DSA. Failure to satisfy the Commission could result in penalties of up to 6% of the company’s annual global revenue and an order to address the identified problems.
