News Summary

The European Commission has levied a €120 million fine on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, marking the first enforcement under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). This penalty arises from X’s breaches of the DSA’s transparency obligations, specifically criticizing the platform’s design of the blue checkmark as ‘deceptive,’ transforming it from a user verification tool to a paid feature. Additional breaches include inadequate transparency in X’s advertisement repository and obstructing researchers’ access to public data, thus hindering independent scrutiny of potential risks. The EU Commission has mandated that X devise a plan to address these issues, with a 60-day deadline to rectify the blue checkmark system and a 90-day timeline to improve transparency in ads and public data access.