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Elon Musk has accused the European Commission of offering X an “illegal secret deal if we quietly censored speech” after his platform became the first to fall foul of the European Union‘s (EU) Digital Services Act.
X, formerly Twitter, was today found in a preliminary ruling to have breached the new act.
The commission’s hearing, which X can respond to before it reaches a final view, concluded that X “deceives” users by designing and operating its interface for “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark,” a change that came in when Musk took over the platform.
Furthermore, X “does not comply with the required transparency on advertising,” the Commission added, along with failing to “provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out” in the act.
Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager tweeted several hours ago that X “misleads users, fails to provide adequate ad repository and blocks access to data for researchers.”
Responding, Musk accused the commission of “offering X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.”
“The other platforms accepted that deal,” he wrote. “X did not.”
The Digital Services Act came into force last year, placing extra obligations on big companies to protect users against extreme content, with fines and suspensions both a possibility if the likes of X, Meta or Google fall foul. X left the EU’s code of practice which ensured social media platforms got ready in time to operate within the confines of the new laws, but the EU was always clear that the new laws will still apply to the tech giant. EU research had previously found that X had the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.