The European Commission launches fines for regulating digital services with X: imposes a fine of 120 million. Brussels concluded that Elon Musk’s social network failed to comply with its transparency obligations in the ad inventory, in accessing researchers’ data and in the design of its paid version, that is, the popular network. Blue check Or the blue badge that appears on some X, formerly Twitter, accounts that pay for this badge. On the other hand, the Commission has reached an agreement with TikTok on one of these issues: advertising transparency, as the EU executive itself announced on Friday.
This penalty is the first fine imposed on a large digital platform under the Digital Services Regulation (DSA). This amount, 120 million, may seem low when compared to the billions of euros in penalties that Google received in various competition cases or the 500 million that Apple also received for violating market regulations. On the other hand, this is quite high if the total income of the latest fine imposed on Google, €2,950 million, barely amounts to 1%.
The punishment comes shortly after the United States pressured the European Union to relax its digital rules if it wanted to negotiate trade improvements in steel and aluminum trade. “DSA has nothing to do with censorship,” explains the committee’s vice chair, Hanna Virkkonen, about one of the accusations that came out of Washington against this rule. “This is a decision about X transparency, about these matters Blue check“It is very important for users to know what it is about, and about the lack of transparency in its advertising repository and accessibility for researchers,” explains the Finn in Brussels to a group of media outlets, including EL PAÍS.
The commission’s technicians believe that the blue tick could make X users think it is a verified account, when in reality it is not. There will be a deception for which a $45 million fine was imposed. The lack of transparency in filing ads costs $35 million. The latest violation, problems with researchers’ access to data, entails a $40 million fine.
The investigation into X’s case was opened almost two years ago. During this time, there was an intermediate step, in July 2024, when the Commission reached a preliminary conclusion that this social network did not comply with the DSA, which imposes greater obligations on large internet operators than on other digital platforms due to their greater potential risks to users. “I accept that,” Virkkonen admitted when asked if it had not been too long, but added that this was the first time such a rule had been approved and that “the Commission teams wanted to make sure they had a solid legal basis to make this decision.”
With this fine, Brussels takes a step against Elon Musk that it has not taken yet. Whatever clashes may have occurred, and however loud they may have been, they were verbal. The American businessman, owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and the social network X, entered into sharp clashes with European political leaders and European institutions. His support for the far right in the German elections at the beginning of the year meant that the Commission demanded that his network be transparent. A Commission spokeswoman said at the time: “Musk can express his personal views and political views in the EU. That’s his right. Now, when you have a platform, you have to make sure that the platform operates within legal limits and that the platform is not being misused in electoral processes.”
In the case of TikTok, the video social network owned by Chinese giant ByteDance, the company “made binding commitments that dispel all the concerns raised by the Commission in its investigation and in its preliminary conclusions in May 2025,” the EU Foundation explained in its statement.
Like X, Tik Tok has also had clashes with the committee. The Chinese company has released another DSA tool. He tried to launch a service in Spain and France that pays users for watching videos. Brussels asked him for “proof of his safety” and threatened to suspend his new application based on this regulation. Finally, it was Bytedance itself that pulled the service.
The DSA was approved in 2022 and will gradually enter into force in 2023. This regulation, a type of rule that is applied directly in member states without turning them into national laws, requires large digital platforms to maintain an “accessible and searchable” advertising repository, which is a library of all ads published on each network, which is considered essential so that regulations and civil society, including researchers, can detect fraud, advertising of illegal products or coordinated disinformation campaigns. These types of legal risks have a much greater impact when they occur through large platforms – which in this law are those with more than 45 million users or 10% of the population.