X Company (Twitter) Alleged to Violate Digital Services Act in EU

TapTechNews July 12th news, Thierry Breton, the Internal Market Commissioner of the European Union, wrote today that the Commission's preliminary view is that X (Twitter) has violated the Digital Services Act in related fields such as advertising transparency and researchers' data access.

TapTechNews summarizes the key points as follows:

The 'blue checkmark certification' system launched by X company does not conform to industry practice and misleads users: Anyone can obtain this 'certification' by subscribing, which will affect making free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the account and interactive content. There is evidence that malicious actors abuse the 'blue checkmark' to deceive users.

X company fails to comply with advertising transparency requirements: It does not provide a searchable and reliable advertising library, but sets up design features and access barriers, making the advertising library unable to achieve the purpose of being transparent to users. In particular, this design does not allow for necessary supervision and research on emerging risks brought about by online advertising distribution.

X company fails to provide researchers with access to its public data as stipulated in the Digital Services Act: It prohibits qualified researchers from independently accessing its public data (such as by scraping) according to the terms of service. In addition, the process by which X company provides APIs to qualified researchers'seems to prevent' researchers from carrying out research projects or forces them to pay exorbitant fees.

Breton said that if the Commission's preliminary view is ultimately confirmed, the Commission will make a decision that violates the relevant provisions of the Digital Services Fee. Such a decision may include imposing a huge fine of 6% of X company's global annual total turnover and requiring the service provider to take measures to address the violation.