EU Fines Elon Musk’s X €120 Million for Disinformation Rule Violations

European Commission Fines X Platform €120 Million for Violating EU Digital Laws

The European Commission imposed a €120 million ($139 million) fine on Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Friday, marking the first penalty issued under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The Commission found that X violated transparency requirements designed to protect European users from disinformation and manipulation.

The DSA, implemented last year, requires large social media platforms to provide transparency to users and external researchers or face fines of up to 6% of their global turnover. For X, which is privately owned by Musk and doesn’t publicly disclose financial information, the fine represents a relatively small amount compared to Musk’s estimated net worth of $490 billion—approximately 0.0245% of his personal wealth.

According to the Commission, X misled users about its “verified mark” scheme—commonly known as the “blue checkmark”—by failing to adequately verify account holders who pay for the status. “Anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified’ status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account,” the Commission stated in its announcement.

The ruling also cited X’s failure to maintain proper transparency regarding political advertisements. Under the DSA, platforms must provide a searchable repository of political ads that updates in near real-time, allowing third parties to track who is being targeted by specific content. The Commission found that X’s ad repository contains “design features and access barriers” that undermine this purpose, including excessive processing delays and omission of critical information such as ad content, topics, and the legal entities funding the advertisements.

Researchers’ access to public data emerged as another point of contention. The Commission noted that X’s terms of service “prohibit eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, including through scraping,” and impose “unnecessary barriers” that impede research into systemic risks within the European Union.

The fine signals potentially broader geopolitical ramifications, as U.S. officials have increasingly characterized EU digital regulations as unfair targeting of American companies. The Biden administration has complained that such regulations effectively introduce non-tariff barriers to trade and function as a backdoor taxation method on U.S. businesses.

X’s leadership has strongly opposed the Commission’s actions. Before the fine was announced, the platform’s Global Government Affairs team characterized potential enforcement actions as “an unprecedented act of political censorship and an attack on free speech,” claiming X had “gone above and beyond” to comply with the DSA.

Musk himself has framed the regulations as coercive attempts to force censorship. The issue has drawn attention from high-level U.S. political figures, including Vice President JD Vance, who wrote on X the evening before the fine was announced: “Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”

The conflict highlights a growing transatlantic divide over digital governance. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned American technology companies in August that complying with European regulations could potentially violate U.S. law if it amounts to “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws,” referencing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

European officials have pushed back against characterizations that the DSA mandates censorship. Anne-Sophie Dhiver of Viginum, France’s anti-disinformation agency, previously told Recorded Future News that while Musk has every right to communicate on his platform, the concern centers on “potential manipulation of the algorithm, to amplify or reduce the visibility of some content,” which would violate DSA requirements to mitigate systematic risks.

The Commission’s enforcement action comes amid broader scrutiny of X and Musk’s leadership. Critics have pointed to Musk’s personal account for comments perceived as sympathetic to far-right ideologies—content that constitutes criminal offenses in many European countries with historical Nazi occupation.

The Commission retains the authority to escalate measures in cases of continued non-compliance, potentially including restricting access to X throughout the European Union.