BRUSSELS: The European Union (EU) announced on July 15 it had accepted a plan by Elon Musk’s X social media platform to correct digital content violations that led to a €120mil (US$138mil/RM562.29mil) fine.
The European Commission imposed the penalty in December 2025 for breaching its transparency obligation, the deceptive design of its “blue checkmark” for supposedly verified accounts, and its failure to provide access to public data for researchers.
The fine was the first ever under the bloc’s landmark Digital Services Act (DSA), which has come under fierce attack in the United States, including claims that it allows censorship.
X proposed measures that would boost access by researchers, including to ad content, and respond on a timely basis.
The platform has already changed its blue checkmarks from “verified” to “premium” users.
The measures to be undertaken by X are “an important step in the right direction”, said Thomas Regnier, the European Commission’s spokesman on digital issues.
“The approved measures will enable researchers, civil society and the general public to gain more transparency into X’s systems and the impact on users,” he added.
X has six months to implement the measures, and they will be subject to an external and independent audit.
The agreement on the measures does not halt an appeal to the fine that X filed in February.
The US tech industry and the Trump administration have bristled at European efforts to regulate the sector.
US President Donald Trump called the X fine censorship.
A few weeks later, the US State Department announced sanctions on five individuals, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton.
The European Commission has not fully completed the probe it opened in 2023 into X.
It also opened at the start of the year an investigation over AI chatbot Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfake images of women and minors. – AFP
