Elon Musk is set for another battle with the European Union after the bloc fined his social media site X.
The EU said on Friday it had issued a fine of €120 million ($140 million) to X over a number of violations, including the “deceptive design” of the site’s blue checkmarks.
Earlier on Friday, Musk reposted an X post from US Vice President JD Vance, who warned the EU against fining Musk’s company and said the bloc should avoid “attacking American companies over garbage.”
The European Union launched its investigation into X two years ago under its landmark Digital Services Act, or DSA.
In its decision on Friday, the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory arm, said the ability for anyone to pay for a “verified” checkmark makes it difficult for users to assess whether an account is authentic, leaving them open to scams and impersonation fraud.
The Commission said this violated regulations under the DSA prohibiting social media platforms from falsely claiming users have been verified. The ruling also found that X had committed additional breaches by failing to provide researchers access to public data and not making its advertisement repository transparent enough.
X’s parent company, xAI, said “Legacy Media Lies” in what seemed to be an automated response to a Business Insider request for comment.
Making blue checkmarks available to buy was one of the first moves Musk made after buying the social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022. Previously, Twitter assigned the checkmark to accounts to prevent impersonation.
The initial rollout of purchasable checkmarks was chaotic, with parody accounts impersonating politicians, celebrities, and major brands, sowing confusion and even temporarily tanking a major drugmaker’s stock price.
Since then, Musk has radically overhauled the social media site and, earlier this year, the billionaire announced that X had been acquired by his AI startup xAI.
The Tesla CEO has been highly critical of the EU’s attempts to regulate social media companies. In response to a preliminary finding by the European Commission last year, Musk accused the regulator of censoring speech and called the DSA “misinformation.”
