As digital enforcement kicks in, a high-profile investigation into Elon Musk’s X is still open.
The European Union on Wednesday threw the first stone in a long fight — fining Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of euros for breaking digital antitrust rules.
That prompted an immediate question: What about X?
The platform formerly known as Twitter has been in the EU’s sights under a parallel tech regulation, the Digital Services Act, since its content moderation and staffing policies were overhauled when the world’s richest man Elon Musk bought it in 2022.
X was last summer found in preliminary breach of the rules — but that finding hasn’t led to a fine yet, feeding suspicions that Brussels is holding off because of the close ties that Musk has with United States President Donald Trump.
Wednesday’s decision shows “the EU can stop abuse of market power by Apple,” said Maltese social democrat member of the European Parliament Alex Agius Saliba. “We want to see the same approach … when it comes to the Digital Services Act, and the conclusion of the investigation into breaches by X, TikTok and Meta of the rules that protect our citizens online.”
Far-right Danish MEP Anders Vistisen, meanwhile, called Wednesday’s move “a reckless EU decision which alienates the U.S. while the EU should be working for a trade deal.”
POLITICO has all you need to know about the X probe and what to expect next.
The European Commission is investigating whether X adheres to its requirements to act on illegal content and fake news, as well as on proper transparency and design.
The investigation launched in late 2023 with the Commission looking into five areas of infringement: whether X has done enough to mitigate the risks of spreading illegal content and to help users flag content; its measures to fight disinformation, specifically via X’s Community Notes; the transparency of its advertising; data access for researchers; and the use of blue check marks that connote trust but can be bought — which could constitute deceptive design.
The Commission said in July 2024 that the platform is indeed breaking the law on the last three points. It’s now in discussion with X about its findings.
In the meantime, the Commission deepened the investigation in January by adding questions around content moderation. That came in the wake of Musk’s X interview with Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, ahead of the German election.
X is designated as a Very Large Online Platform under the DSA, meaning it has to follow stricter rules due to its size and importance.
The probe into X is one of 10 open investigations, with the others looking into AliExpress, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and Temu. The Commission in April announced plans to beef up staff, adding 60 people to the 127 already working on DSA enforcement.
The EU executive is grappling with a political reality in which the issues of free speech and disinformation are top of the agenda, with Musk one of the flagbearers in this fight.
As the EU looks to effectively counter disinformation, any conclusion to the X investigation will have to withstand not only legal but also political scrutiny.
When the Commission announced its preliminary findings in July 2024, Musk said his platform had resisted efforts by EU regulators to censor users. “The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” he wrote to more than 200 million followers. “The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
Trump has taken aim at the DSA regulation for hampering Americans’ freedom of speech, and EU-U.S. relations are at their lowest point in decades.
Adding to the bind is the lack of legal precedent and the vague wording of the DSA. The Digital Markets Act — under which Meta and Apple were fined Wednesday — is building on decades of established precedent on competition law, whereas the DSA is a first-of-its-kind regulation often dealing with fuzzy concepts.
It doesn’t draw clear lines on what features are permissible, nor does it judge platforms solely based on the results of their efforts to combat illegal content — instead, it seeks to determine whether what platforms are doing is good enough.
The parts of the investigation that remain to be determined are exactly those that relate to these greyer areas. Things like deceptive design do have a precedent in the unfair commercial practices directive, for example, so they are easier to pin down.
A recent report sought to put the figure at around $1 billion — although the Commission denied both the number and the suggestion that any final decision has been taken.
The DSA can levy fines of up to 6 percent of a platform’s yearly worldwide revenue. X’s global annual revenue is not publicly disclosed but is estimated at $2.5 billion, which would bring the upper threshold to $150 million.
If the Commission sought to fine Musk based on his entire holdings as the provider of the platform, however, they would be looking at a combined revenue of about $115 billion. That would bring the fine to $6.9 billion, the biggest ever on a tech company — making it the nuclear option that would undoubtedly be challenged.
Tech companies have plenty of experience in paying armies of lawyers to challenge EU decisions in court.
The Commission may very well prefer to agree with X on some remedies rather than fines — not least because this could have a meaningful impact on users. A fine can take decades to land in EU coffers.
Those remedies could return X users to an earlier era, one when blue check marks were handed out based on users’ verified positions rather than on cash, and Community Notes were supplemented by robust fact-checking. They could also require changes to X’s transparency systems, including those for researcher access and advertisements.
But this Commission will be aware that any remedies will set a precedent on what is “enough” for platforms to do when it comes to mitigating risks and fighting information manipulation.
The DSA regulation is still teething, and many of the tools it foresees to combat illegal content are wobbly at best in various EU countries.
If the Commission can’t successfully land its first DSA decision, it will likely fuel those on the far right who condemn the rules as a censorship tool — both in the U.S. and within EU countries.
These facts point to a possible path in favor of remedies rather than penalties. The Commission has already changed its tune in recent weeks, coming to an agreement with TikTok not to launch a lite version of its app in Europe.
Whatever fines or remedies the Commission lands on for X will be a major litmus test of how they plan to use the regulation elsewhere. Other platforms will be taking note.
Digital rights campaigners, and center and left-wing parties, say the current remedies being offered are not enough, and are eagerly awaiting the results of the investigations.
Given the politics, the decision may well be out of the hands of the bureaucrats building the legal case and on the desk of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — but it will also have to stand up in court.
When asked about the progress of the investigations, Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen said staff are working at full speed, but also promised to accelerate the work. The results, she said, need to be “evidence-based.”