X, the former Twitter, is not compliant with the Digital Services Act (DSA) in three areas, according to the European Commission. This is the conclusion of a preliminary investigation.
After several discussions with X, experts and consulting its own expert teams, the European Commission tentatively concludes that the social media platform commits three violations.
Dark patterns
One of the stumbling blocks is the blue checkmarks. According to the investigation, these are not in line with industry standards and give malicious actors an easy-to-use tool to scam users online. “Users were used to a blue checkmark being a sign of trustworthiness and credibility. The change creates a lot of confusion and is misleading,” a European Commission spokesman said in a briefing with journalists.
The marks are said to be a form of dark patterns in which design elements of a website were developed to mislead users. Under the DSA, such elements are prohibited. One feature that led the European Commission to this decision is the fact that accounts with a blue checkmark score higher in responses to X messages.
Under the leadership of Elon Musk, the former blue checkmark that stood for independent verification of a person or organization has evolved into a gold checkmark. This change is confusing and according to recent research, the gold checkmarks are also highly untrustworthy. These accounts often appear to be taken over by hackers, only to be resold on the dark web.
Also read: Verified X accounts being traded on the darkweb
Insufficient transparency
In addition, the platform does not meet the transparency requirements for advertising. This is related to the third conclusion, which concerns the weakened openness to researchers. Data collection or scrapping has become prohibited on X under the new rules, but according to the European Commission, this is not legitimate. In addition, the study denounces the fact that APIs are no longer open to researchers for free. All this would make it impossible to do the required research on emerging risks arising from the spread of online ads.
A preliminary decision was made today on three of the four ongoing investigations on X in terms of the DSA. The investigations were set for 2023.