LONDON — European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X $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, its a sweeping rulebook that 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 from Brussels and vowed to retaliate if American tech companies are penalized.
The company did not respond immediately to an email request for comment.
Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because of their “deceptive design” that could expose users to scams and manipulation.
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 puts up “unnecessary barriers” for researchers trying to access data.
“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 Virkunnen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement.
