Twitter Fined Under Digital Services Act
Ashley Belanger (Hacker News):
The European Commission announced that X would be fined nearly $140 million, with the potential to face “periodic penalty payments” if the platform fails to make corrections.
A third of the fine came from one of the first moves Musk made when taking over Twitter. In November 2022, he changed the platform’s historical use of a blue checkmark to verify the identities of notable users. Instead, Musk started selling blue checks for about $8 per month, immediately prompting a wave of imposter accounts pretending to be notable celebrities, officials, and brands.
Today, X still prominently advertises that paying for checks is the only way to “verify” an account on the platform. But the commission, which has been investigating X since 2023, concluded that “X’s use of the ‘blue checkmark’ for ‘verified accounts’ deceives users.”
Twitter very publicly eliminated the verification program. The blue checkmark now indicates that you’re a premium subscriber (which I’m not, so I lost mine). If you click on a blue checkmark, it shows a popover stating, “This account is verified. Learn more,” with the link accurately describing what the checkmark means. There is still some level of verification (name, photo, phone number, “no signs of being misleading or deceptive”), but they no longer check your government ID. I don’t understand the argument that this is illegal. I did not see a requirement in the DSA that the word “verified” must have a certain meaning. (Government and other officials have a stricter verification process and get a grey checkmark.)
The other parts of the fine are because the DSA wants Twitter to allow researchers access to information about its ads and “the platform’s public data.” The DSA has some interesting requirements for ads. I’d like to see how the other large online platforms and search engines are complying with this. There is still a Twitter API for the public data—maybe the issue is that it’s paid? But most of the data isn’t really public anymore, anyway, since it requires logging in.
On Friday, Musk reposted criticism of the EU fine from a lawyer, Preston Byrne, who quoted Vance’s X post and suggested that Congress should act “ASAP” to pass a law that he proposed. If passed, that law “would allow X to sue the European Commission in US federal court for three times this amount and get injunctive relief against the Commission’s orders.”
Previously:
- Imgur Blocks UK Users Over Age Verification
- Digital Services Act and Thierry Breton vs. Twitter
- Twitter Now Requires Logging In
- New Twitter API Tiers
- EU Approves Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act
