X blocks European Commission ads after €120m penalty
X has reportedly terminated the European Commission’s advertising account days after receiving a €120 million fine under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The sanction targets X’s blue tick system, which the Commission found to be deceptive due to the absence of meaningful user verification. According to the decision, this design exposes users to impersonation fraud, scams, and wider manipulation risks, and is compounded by alleged shortcomings in advertising transparency and researcher access to public data.
Nikita Bier, a senior figure at X, publicly accused the Commission of using a rarely active account to exploit a feature in the platform’s advertising system. He claimed that the Commission’s post about the fine used a link formatted to appear as a video to artificially boost reach, and stated that the “exploit” had now been closed. Based on this interpretation, X terminated the Commission’s ad account, suggesting that the regulator was seeking to avoid the same rules applied to other advertisers.
The Commission, in turn, maintains that it used only the standard tools provided by the platform to corporate users and insists those tools must comply both with X’s own terms and with the EU legislative framework. This incident highlights a growing tension: large platforms are increasingly willing to retaliate against regulators on the product side, while regulators are escalating enforcement under new horizontal instruments, especially the DSA.
X has 60 days to respond formally to the Commission’s concerns regarding its blue checkmarks and related practices or face additional penalties. The dispute unfolds against a backdrop of previous conflicts between X and regulators in Brazil and Australia, as well as sharp political criticism from US officials, including comments by Elon Musk calling for the abolition of the EU. For practitioners, the case illustrates early-stage DSA enforcement dynamics, the scrutiny of verification and advertising systems, and the strategic interplay between platform governance and regulatory oversight.
