Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – Elon Musk’s X social media platform said Friday that it had filed an appeal with the European Union’s top court against a 120-million-euro ($142 million) fine for breaking its digital content rules. The European Commission imposed the penalty in December for violations including breaching its transparency obligation, triggering an angry reaction in the United States.
X said it filed an appeal at the General Court of the EU challenging the fine by the commission, which acts as the EU’s digital watchdog. The fine was the first ever under the bloc’s landmark Digital Services Act (DSA), which has come under fierce attack in the United States, including claims that it allows censorship. X on Friday denounced what it called the EU’s “incomplete and superficial investigation”.
Its global government affairs team said on the platform that the EU’s probe included “grave procedural errors, a tortured interpretation of the obligations under the DSA, and systematic breaches of rights of defence and basic due process requirements suggesting prosecutorial bias”. “This landmark case is the first judicial challenge to a DSA fine,” it added. An EU spokesman told AFP the commission was aware of the appeal and “is ready to defend its decision in court”.
– Wider probe –
The EU said last year that X was guilty of breaching the DSA’s transparency obligation as part of an investigation that began in December 2023. The commission also said that X’s breaches included the deceptive design of its “blue checkmark” for supposedly verified accounts, and its failure to provide access to public data for researchers. Musk at the time hit back by saying the EU should be “abolished”. A few weeks later, the US State Department announced sanctions on five individuals including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton. A former top tech regulator at the commission, Breton often clashed with tech tycoons including Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.
X has frequently been in the EU’s crosshairs. Under the same DSA probe, EU regulators are still investigating how X tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The first part of the probe had appeared to stall since 2024. Then in January 2026, the EU opened another investigation under the DSA law over its AI chatbot Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfake images of women and minors after an international backlash.
© 2024 AFP
