The €120 million ($140 million) fine is for breaches of Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the first time Brussels has enforced that law in this way since it came into force in 2022. Europe’s online commissars cite several supposed infractions. The silliest complaint is that X’s system for selling “verification” blue checkmarks “negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with.”
More serious, Brussels insists X must make data about advertising on the platform readily available to outsiders, and shouldn’t use its terms of service to prohibit data scraping by “eligible researchers.” The EU claims this open access to X’s commercial data is vital to allow researchers and “civil society” to spot scams and information warfare.
That reference to “civil society” is a tell. Brussels wants to force X (and inevitably other platforms) to share data that hostile activists can wield against the platforms in future regulatory actions or litigation. All based on a theory that European citizens are too dumb to take the things they read on X or elsewhere online with a grain of salt.
Mr. Musk and Trump Administration officials describe this regulatory case as a form of censorship, and it’s hard to disagree. Mr. Musk wrote on X last year that the European Commission, the EU bureaucratic arm levying the fine, offered X a “secret deal” to drop the case in exchange for the platform censoring unspecified forms of speech.'
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