Elon Musk’s attempt to turn blue checks into X income boosts has hit a big snag.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch responsible for enforcing Bloc’s rules, just hit X with a fine of 120 million euros (about $140 million) for violating material obligations under its Digital Numbers Act.
Specifically, the commission took issue with the Platform’s “Design Descriptive” for its blue badges, and the lack of transparency surrounding its advertisers.
“Fake users have blue signs, the information they want through advertisements and to block researchers who have a place online,” said Henna Vice Montsio President of sovereignty, security and democracy at the commission, in a statement.
This is the latest return of the platform since Musk bought it in 2022 for $ 44 billion. In just three years, Musk’s business decisions have paid off miss it A large chunk of the platform’s advertisers, outgoing users, then hits its money.
The Commission first opened an investigation in 2023 to see if the Social Media Site violated the recently passed digital law, which aims to regulate digital platforms and reduce harmful content online.
Now, it seems that the musk changes in the blue checkmark are a big problem. Twitter if stored verified badges of physical figures and organizations whose identity was confirmed by the company. This was intended to increase security, target quality news responders, and help high profile users avoid spamming.
In 2022, under Susk’s ownership, X began offering blue checkmarkmarkracking to anyone willing to pay a monthly subscription fee.
“In x, anyone can pay to get ‘verified’ status without the company verifying the identity behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of the accounts and the content they create,” the commission wrote in a press release.
The commission says this paid verification system can expose users to fraud and scams.
In addition, the European body took issue with the lack of subtlety in the maintenance of the company’s advertising, which could help researchers to detect scams and organized activities. The company also failed DSA rules to provide researchers with access to the platform’s public data.
UX NOW has 60 days to explain to the commission how it plans to fix the blue problem, and 90 days to address other issues. Otherwise, it can face many fines.
While this good may have just dropped in the musk bucket – one of his companies, Tesla, voted this year to give him a package of payments of $ 1 trillion – another hit on his social media site.
Since ux is now a private company, it is not required to disclose financial information. However, Twitter has been reported to generate more than $5 billion in revenue by 2021. In contrast, industry analysts estimate that X will generate $2.5 billion in 2024 in 2024.
X He makes most of his money from advertisements. But paid subscriptions brought in nearly $200 million from 2021 to 2024, TechCrunch intelligence reported in October, revealing strong app figures.
It is important to note that this figure is based only on subscriptions made through the mobile app on Android and iOS devices. However, after accounting for App Store commissions, X would have made at least $140 million from subscriptions, a solid estimate. That’s about the same as X’s total commission.
