- On Friday, the EU Commission accused X of deceiving users with its substandard account verification practices (the process of giving out blue checkmarks).
- X is yet to respond to these allegations but if found guilty, will have to pay a fine of up to 6% of its global annual revenue.
- The observations come from a formal investigation opened against X last year after authorities found some Hamas and Hezbollah-related accounts on the platform.
Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (Twitter) has been accused of breaching the EU’s Digital Services Act, with the number one accusation being “misleading users.”
Margrethe Vestager, a senior official at the European Commission, read a statement on Friday addressing the issue and said:
“In our view, X does not comply with the DSA in key transparency areas, by using dark patterns and thus misleading users, by failing to provide an adequate ad repository, and by blocking access to data for researchers.”
Questions were also raised on how the company chose to handle account verification. The agency said that X’s criteria for offering the coveted blue check mark do not meet industry standards. So, in a way, it’s deceiving its users.
Unlike other social media platforms, where the verification mark is given out to public figures after careful consideration, X gives it out to anyone who pays for its monthly subscription. This means that users with malicious intent can easily gain the trust of others on the platform.
X was also accused of violating EU’s advertising policies about who can access its data. Under the transparency clause in the DSA, companies are supposed to have a searchable ad repository, which X does not.
Last but not least, X also doesn’t provide adequate access to its public data to researchers. In fact, it also raised the prices to access company data and banned “scraping” of data on the platform.
If X is found guilty of breaching the DSA guidelines, it’ll have to pay a fine of up to 6% of its global annual revenue.
A formal investigation was opened into X last year after authorities found some Hamas and Hezbollah-related accounts on X. Basically, X was granting verification to terrorist groups, who were regularly spewing hate content through their accounts.
Naturally, the EU is now also looking into X’s content moderation practices and evaluating if it’s doing enough to fight misinformation on the platform.
What Is the DSA?
DSA stands for Digital Services Act, which is a set of laws introduced last year to effectively govern online entities and keep their power in check.
One of the primary rules of the DSA is that companies should avoid “dark patterns”. Basically, it means that companies should refrain from adding any element to their platforms that will subtly nudge users to either give up their personal data or make a decision that the company wants them to make.
For example, you might have noticed that when you enter a new website, it tries to persuade you to share your personal details by displaying a large pop-up box in the middle of the text, while the option to cancel it is often hidden somewhere in small fonts.
So, sometimes, users who just want to get back to the site’s main content reluctantly share their details. This is a form of manipulation that the EU wants companies to avoid.
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