European Commission Charges X With Breach of DSA

I guess the European Commission hasn’t taken off for their months-long summer vacation quite yet:

[T]he Commission has issued preliminary findings of non-compliance on three grievances:

  • First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark” in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users. Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a “verified” status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the “verified account” to deceive users.

  • Second, X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository, but instead put in place design features and access barriers that make the repository unfit for its transparency purpose towards users. In particular, the design does not allow for the required supervision and research into emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online.

  • Third, X fails to provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out in the DSA. In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service. In addition, X’s process to grant eligible researchers access to its application programming interface (API) appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their research projects or leave them with no other choice than to pay disproportionally high fees.

I don’t really have an opinion on the second and third points, but the first one seems daft to me. Here’s how commissioner Thierry Breton is quoted in the EC’s press release:

“Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA. We also consider that X’s ads repository and conditions for data access by researchers are not in line with the DSA transparency requirements. X has now the right of defence — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines and require significant changes.”

Blue checkmarks were indeed used, “back in the day”, to indicate “verified” accounts. But upon purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk eliminated that program. They don’t advertise it as “Verified” any more; they just call it “Twitter Premium” and make it very clear that blue checkmarks indicate premium account status. That’s illegal under the DSA?

Anyway, here’s Elon Musk, replying to Breton’s announcement of this investigation:

How we know you’re real? 🧐

And:

We look forward to a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.

And, more intriguingly, replying to Margrethe Vestager:

The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

X did not.

The weapon the EC wields is their ability to fine companies 10–20 percent of global revenue. Musk is in a unique position to tell them to fuck off. Twitter’s revenue peaked at $5 billion in 2021 — when the company was still publicly-held — and has surely declined since then. A $500 million fine is figuratively nothing to Musk. He’d gladly pay that just for the attention a public fight over this will bring to him personally and X as a platform.

★ Friday, 12 July 2024