LONDON — European Union authorities are investigating whether Elon Musk’s online platform X broke tough new social media rules in the first such investigation since rules aimed at making online content less toxic came into effect.
“Today we are opening formal infringement proceedings against @X” under the Digital Services Act, European Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a post on the platform on Monday.
“The Commission will now investigate X’s systems and policies related to certain alleged violations,” spokesman Johannes Barke said at a press briefing in Brussels. “It does not affect the outcome of the investigation.”
The investigation will examine whether X, formerly known as Twitter, failed to do enough to curb the spread of illegal content and whether measures to combat “information manipulation”, particularly through its Community Notes feature, were effective.
The EU will also examine whether X has been sufficiently transparent to researchers and look into allegations that its user interface, including its blue check subscription service, has a “deceptive design”.
” X remains married to complying with the Digital Services Act and cooperating with the nonsupervisory process,” the company said in a statement. “It is important that this process remains free from political influence and complies with the law. X is concentrated on creating a safe and inclusive terrain for all druggies of our platform while guarding freedom of expression, and we will continue to work lifelessly to achieve this goal. .”
A number of big tech companies have faced increased scrutiny since the EU’s Digital Services Act came into effect earlier this year, threatening fines of up to 6% of their global profit — which could run into the billions or indeed an EU ban.
The DSA is a wide-ranging set of rules designed to keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful content that is either illegal, such as child sexual abuse content or terrorist content, or violates the platform’s terms of use, such as genocidal propaganda or anorexia
The EU has already named X the worst place for fake news on the internet, and officials have called on owner Musk, who bought the platform a year ago, to do more to clean it up. The European Commission asked X about how it dealt with hate, disinformation and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war after the conflict began.
