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2 months ago
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The European Commission accused social media platform X of breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) over its verified accounts policy and lapses in transparency, in preliminary findings released on Friday (12 July).
These are the Commission’s first preliminary findings under the DSA, Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice-president, said on Friday.
The DSA is the EU’s landmark content moderation law, under which X has been designated a Very Large Online Platform, which means it has to adhere to strict transparency and risk management rules.
The Commission has identified three issues of non-compliance with the DSA to which X can respond. If the company’s responses are unsatisfactory, the Commission can impose fines of up to 6% of X’s annual global turnover.
The first issue is around X’s design of verified accounts with a blue checkmark, which the Commission said does not align with industry standards and misleads users. This status can be obtained by anyone, undermining users’ ability to judge account authenticity and content credibility, the Commission said.
X also lacks the required advertising transparency because it does not maintain a searchable and reliable advertisement repository.
This is another contentious part of the DSA. Amazon’s appeal against this DSA obligation was dismissed by the Court of Justice of the EU in March. In the same month, three pornography websites sued the Commission over this obligation.
The third non-compliance issue is that X restricts researchers’ access to public data. The process to access X’s API appears to discourage researchers through high fees, potentially impeding their research projects, said the Commission.
Last December, the Commission opened formal infringement proceedings against X, also over alleged breaches of the DSA.
When Euractiv reached out for a comment, an automated response from X’s press email said “Busy now, please check back later.”
[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic]
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