The European Union said today that paid blue check marks on social media network X are misleading users and are being abused by malicious parties. The EU is threatening Elon Musk's platform with millions of dollars in fines if the company does not make changes.
Allowing accounts to pay for verification violates the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), European Commission officials said Friday, as it “negatively impacts users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of accounts.” X now has a chance to respond to the findings. If Musk cannot reach a resolution with the EU, the company faces fines of up to 6 percent of its global annual turnover.
Blue check marks, which appear next to the account names of X Premium subscribers, have been the subject of controversy since Musk took over the platform in 2022. “Previously, blue check marks represented reliable sources of information. Now, with X, we provisionally consider that they mislead users and breach the DSA,” Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, said in a statement. “X now has the right to a defence, but if our position is confirmed, we will impose fines and demand significant changes.”
X did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.
Before Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter, blue checkmarks were used to verify the identities of influential accounts ranging from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to celebrity Kim Kardashian. Approved by Twitter staff, blue checkmarks were also common among active researchers and journalists, indicating they were trustworthy sources of information.
Proponents of that system argued that it would help users identify trustworthy voices while curbing scammers and impersonators. But Musk decried the arrangement as elitist and “corrupt to the core.” The ability to buy a blue checkmark for $8 a month, he said, was an antidote to Twitter’s “current lords and peasants” attitude. “Power to the people!” he posted, as he announced the new subscription model.
But after a series of scandals — NBA star LeBron James was among the high-profile figures targeted by impersonator accounts with paid blue checks — X introduced a more complicated color-coded system that Musk described as “painful, but necessary.” Verified businesses can get gold checks, gray checks go to governments, and in April 2024, users deemed “influential” would have their blue checks reinstated for free.
Despite the changes, the EU said on Friday that X's verification system does not align with industry practices. Officials also alleged that X does not comply with local advertising transparency rules and does not give researchers sufficient access to its public data, using methods such as scraping. The cost of access to X's API — enterprise plans start at $42,000 per month — discourages researchers from pursuing projects or forces them to pay disproportionately high fees, the commission said. “In our view, X does not comply with the DSA in key transparency areas,” EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement about X, adding that this was the first time a company had been charged for “preliminary findings” under the Digital Services Act.
The X reprimand is the latest in a series of notices the Commission has sent to major tech companies as European regulators deploy new rules designed to curb tech giants’ market power and improve the way they operate. The EU has not given X a deadline to respond to the findings.
In the past month, Apple, Microsoft and Meta have all been accused of breaching EU rules. Meta and Apple must resolve their cases by March 2025 to avoid fines. Yesterday, Apple said it would make its Tap and Go wallet technology available to rivals in its latest concession to the local regulator’s demands.
