Blue X checks are misleading and transparency is insufficient, says EU

LONDON (AP) — The European Union said Friday that Elon Musk’s blue X tags are misleading and that the online platform fails to meet transparency and accountability requirements, the first allegations against the tech company since new EU social media rules came into force.

The European Commission has presented the preliminary findings of its investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, under the Digital Services Act covering 27 countries.

The rulebook, also known as the DSA, is a comprehensive set of regulations that gives platforms greater responsibility for protecting European users and removing harmful or illegal content and products from their sites, or face heavy fines.

Regulators have criticized blue X checks, saying they constitute “dark patterns” that are inconsistent with industry best practices and can be used by malicious actors to defraud users.

Before Musk’s takeover, the checkmarks mirrored the verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians, and other influential accounts. After Musk bought the site in 2022, he began issuing them to anyone who paid $8 a month for one.

“Because anyone can sign up and obtain such ‘verified’ status, it negatively impacts users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and content they interact with,” the commission said.

An email request for comment to X elicited an automated response: “I’m busy right now, please check back later.” The chief spokesman reportedly left the company in June.

“In the past, BlueChecks stood for trustworthy sources of information,” European Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement. “Now, with X, our preliminary view is that they are deceiving users and violating the DSA.”

The Commission also accused X of failing to comply with advertising transparency rules. Under the DSA, platforms must publish a database of all digital ads they have broadcast, with information such as who paid for them and their intended audience.

But the X ad database is not “searchable and reliable” and has “design features and access barriers” that make it “incapable of transparency,” the commission said. In particular, the database’s design makes it difficult for researchers to investigate “emerging threats” from online ads, it said.

The company also has a poor record of giving researchers access to public data, the commission found. The DSA imposes rules so researchers can study how platforms work and how online threats evolve.

However, scientists cannot access the data themselves by downloading it from the website, and the process of requesting access to data from the company through an interface “appears to discourage scientists” from pursuing their projects or give them no choice but to pay high fees, the statement said.

X now has a chance to respond to the allegations and make changes to comply, which would be legally binding. If the commission is not satisfied, it can impose fines of up to 6% of the company’s annual global revenue and order it to fix the problem.

The findings are just part of the investigation. Regulators are still investigating whether X is not doing enough to stop the spread of illegal content — such as hate speech or incitement to terrorism — and the effectiveness of measures to combat “information manipulation,” particularly through its crowdsourced Community Notes fact-checking feature.

TikTok, e-commerce site AliExpress, and Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook and Instagram, are also the subject of ongoing DSA investigations.