The European Union is calling Elon Musk to order over how he turned social media site X into a haven for disinformation and illegal content.
The EU Commission on Friday formally charged X for failing to respect EU social media law. The platform could face a sweeping multi-million euro fine in a pioneering case under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), a law to clamp down on toxic and illegal online content and algorithms.
Musk’s X has been in Brussels’ crosshairs ever since the billionaire took over the company, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022. X has been accused of letting disinformation and illegal hate speech run wild, roll out misleading authentication features and blocking external researchers from tools to scrutinize how malicious content on the platforms spreads.
The European Commission oversees X and two dozens of the world’s largest online platforms including Facebook, YouTube and others. The EU executive’s probe into Musk’s firm opened in December 2023 and was the first formal investigation. Friday’s charges are the first-ever under the DSA.
Infringements of the DSA could lead to fines of up to 6 percent of a X’s global revenue.
In its preliminary findings, the Commission said X’s platform so-called blue checks had misled users into thinking some content was trustworthy when it wasn’t necessarily.
The EU said X’s blue checks policy was deceiving and had been abused by malicious actors. The checks were initially created as as way to verify users like government officials, public figures and journalists, in efforts to limit misinformation, but Musk changed that policy, allowing users to buy blue check accounts. The new policy has been abused by fraudsters to impersonate U.S. politician Hillary Clinton and author J.K. Rowling, among many other celebrities.
The platform also didn’t respect an obligation to provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository and limited access to its public data to researchers, the Commission said.
X will now have a right to defend itself against the charges and propose measures to alleviate the EU’s concerns.
The Commission said it continues to investigate if X breached rules connected to the spread of illegal content and took sufficient measures to limit disinformation.
The EU so far launched investigations under the DSA into companies including AliExpress, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and TikTok over alleged problems like insufficient consumer protection and addictive algorithms.