The European Union has fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X €120 million (approximately $140 million) for multiple breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA), marking the first major non-compliance decision under the new law.
European Commission officials announced the penalty on Friday, stating that X, formerly known as Twitter, violated several key transparency and user-protection rules following a two-year investigation.
Regulators identified three main areas of non-compliance: X’s paid blue checkmark system, which was deemed a “deceptive design practice” because it allows users to buy verification without meaningful identity checks, misleading the public about account authenticity and increasing exposure to scams and manipulation.
X also violated DSA transparency requirements through its advertising repository, which contained design barriers, omitted key details such as sponsors and target audiences, and experienced long processing delays, hindering researchers’ ability to detect disinformation and scams.
The Commission found that X imposed “unnecessary barriers” on independent researchers seeking access to its public data, which is a critical DSA requirement to allow scrutiny of systemic risks such as misinformation and illegal content.
Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, said that deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring ad information, and blocking researchers “have no place online in the EU,” and stressed that X is being held accountable for undermining users’ rights, with fines under the DSA able to reach up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.
X now faces strict deadlines, with 60 working days to fix its blue checkmark system and 90 working days to resolve issues with its ad repository and researcher access, while failure to comply may result in periodic penalties; the EU’s broader investigation into the platform’s handling of illegal content and information manipulation continues, and Musk has publicly criticized the decision.
