The European Commission has accepted an action plan from Elon Musk’s X to end its breaches of the Digital Services Act, seven months after Brussels issued the first fine ever handed down under the law.
The measures approved on July 15 cover two of the three infringements behind the €120 million ($138 million) penalty imposed on December 5, 2025: the opacity of X’s advertising repository and its refusal to grant researchers access to public data.
The Commission’s own Board for Digital Services, which brings together national regulators, found the plan “overall inadequate” to address the infringement.
Brussels accepted it regardless, saying it had clarified key implementation requirements and would watch closely the points the board considered inadequately addressed.
Thomas Regnier, the Commission’s spokesman for tech sovereignty, called the package “a step in the right direction”, according to AFP.
X said it would add search filters to its advertising repository, display results on the interface rather than in separate spreadsheets and cut its response time from 200 seconds to the minimum technically achievable.
The company also agreed to overhaul the screening of researcher applications, provide the data free of charge and rewrite its terms to allow scraping of public data.
It has six months to deliver, under enhanced supervision and an external audit it must commission itself.
The third infringement, the paid blue checkmark the Commission said deceived users, was handled separately, with the badge relabelled to denote premium rather than verified accounts.
Musk’s company is meanwhile contesting the fine before the EU courts, in the first legal challenge to a DSA non-compliance decision.
The penalty drew a furious response in Washington, where President Donald Trump called it censorship and the State Department later sanctioned five people including former commissioner Thierry Breton.
Brussels has not closed its wider investigation into X, opened in December 2023, and added a case this year over sexualised deepfakes generated by Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot.
