UX claims that the account of the European Commission has been banned. It says it doesn’t use ads

On Saturday, X claims to have been hit by the European Commission with a ban on its X account for X due to what it saw as a violation of the law. Appropriately enough, the European Commission had just slapped the social media platform with a fine of $140 million a day earlier for alleged fraud and lack of transparency.

But the European Commission says it doesn’t pay for ads on X anyway – a commission policy that has stood for more than two years.

According to X Post by X Head of Product Nikita Bier, the European Thite announcing the fine itself is a hoax. Bier says there is an exploit for the X creator, and that the European Commission used it to “send a link that tricks users into thinking it’s a video and increases its reach.”

Indeny of your announcement:

You’ve logged into your Dormant Account to use an exploit in our ad creator – sending a link that tricks users into thinking it’s a video and increases its reach.

As you may know, X believes that everyone should…

– Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) December 6, 2025

The European commission post has a video on it:

Today, we fined X in accordance with the express obligations under the DSA.

We hold the X Answer:
🔹deceptive design of its ‘Blue Checkmark’
🔹Explack of Depecrency of its advertising repository
🔹Failure to provide access to public information for investigators

↓

– European Commission (@EU_COMUME) December 5, 2025

However, a spokesperson for the Commission pointed out to Gizmodo that the European Commission announced a no-announcement policy on X back in 2023, along with the suspension of all other paid services. “The suspension is being implemented,” said a spokesperson for the company.

The post of the European commission seemed to be an overplay button at first, but it automatically video – and this is not different from the surprising video post in X seems to work in normal situations, as in this video in the post from Kawasaki. In our testing, on the desktop the play/pause function indicated by the Play Button Image in the Commission’s Post is normal.

For mobile performance, however, the play/pause function is broken in our tests. Instead of stopping the video, it takes the user to the press release of the European Commission about its fine against X. It is not clear if this is the story about nikita bier. Gizmodo reached out to X for clarification on this multiple times, but did not hear back.

According to the spokesperson of the Commission, “The Commission simply uses the tools of the platforms themselves that are found to be available in our corporate accounts – this was the case with the ‘Post Composer’ tool in X.” Post Composer is an advertising channel feature that lives under the “X Business” umbrella.

⁠ “We expect these tools to fully comply with the platform’s terms and conditions and Tmorms’s, as well as our legal framework,” said a spokesperson for the organization.

When asked, the commission did not specify how it reaches the creator of the post if it does not pay the premium features, and if it can not reach it after the ban bier claims that he issued. The Commission account has a gray checkmark, which is the verification badge “and organizations of effort.” According to X, “some of these accounts can be subscribed to premium organizations.” Two months ago, x added further complexity to this by dividing premium organizations into “Premium Business” and “Premium organizations.”

In any case, a spokesperson for the Commission said in their comment that the commission “always uses all social media platforms in good faith.”

If GizModo receives further clarification from the commission or x, we will update this post.