"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." This violates the DSA as the "deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors," the commission wrote."
"Interestingly, the commission concluded that X made it harder to identify bots, despite Musk's professed goal to eliminate bots being a primary reason he bought Twitter. Perhaps validating the EU's concerns, X recently received backlash after changing a feature that accidentally exposed that some of the platform's biggest MAGA influencers were based "in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes," Futurism reported."
The European Commission fined X nearly $140 million under the Digital Services Act and warned of potential periodic penalties if compliance is not achieved. A significant portion of the fine stemmed from changing verification practices in November 2022, when paid blue checks replaced identity-based verification, triggering waves of impersonation accounts. The Commission concluded that presenting paid checks as verification deceives users and exposes them to scams and manipulation. Investigators also found that platform changes made bot identification more difficult and that some high-profile accounts were tied to regions associated with online scams. X has 60 days to report corrective measures.
Read at Ars Technica
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