What just happened? Elon Musk's X platform is once again in trouble in Europe. The European Union Commission says that the platform is a hotbed of misinformation and illegal content, its transparency and accountability requirements are inadequate, and the blue tick verification system is deceptive. As such, the service could face a fine reaching into the millions of dollars.
Last year, the EU Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, began investigating whether X was breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA). The preliminary findings have just been released, and it won't please Musk.
X has been formally charged for failing to respect EU social media law. One of the main objections was against the blue checkmarks that give anyone a "verified account" if they're willing to pay. Before Musk made verification a paid-for feature, only those in the public eye, such as celebrities and politicians, were able to be verified.
The commission noted that the ability to purchase verification deviates from industry practices and cited evidence of "motivated malicious actors" abusing the system to deceive users. There have been cases of people using the checkmarks to impersonate celebrities and companies. Pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly's share price sank 4% when someone pretending to be the company posted a message claiming it was making insulin free to everyone.
"Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information," European Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement. "Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA."
X has also been charged with failing to comply with requirements related to ad transparency. DSA rules state that platforms must publish a database of all digital advertisements that they've carried, along with details that include who paid for them and their intended audience. The commission writes that X's ad database has "design features and access barriers" that make it "unfit for its transparency purpose."
The Commission said X also limits access to its public data to researchers, which is required by the DSA. The agency will continue to investigate if X broke rules related to the spread of illegal content and took sufficient measures to limit disinformation.
If the Commission's views are confirmed, X could face a fine of up to 6% of its global annual turnover.
Back in September, the European Union identified X as the social media platform with the highest ratio of misinformation/disinformation posts.