EU accepts X action plan after €120 million transparency fine

The European Commission accepted X’s action plan on Tuesday, giving Elon Musk’s platform six months to overhaul how it handles transparency under the Digital Services Act. The plan is now under enhanced supervision.

The move followed the Commission’s €120 million fine on December 5, 2025, for breaches of the Digital Services Act’s transparency rules. X had misdesigned its blue checkmark system, failed to make its advertising repository transparent enough and did not give researchers access to public data. The penalty was the Commission’s first non-compliance decision under the law.

X’s corrective plan focuses on three pressure points: ads, researcher access and data visibility. On the advertising side, the company committed to improving search tools in its ad repository, adding filters, showing results directly in the interface instead of in separate spreadsheets, and enabling API access. X also said it would cut response times from about 200 seconds to the minimum technically achievable and add more ad information, including full content and redirect URLs.

For researchers, X pledged to revise its screening procedures, speed up applications and offer free access to eligible researchers. Eligible researchers must not be contractually barred from scraping public data. Those changes will be reviewed through an external and independent audit, with the audit report due within six months after the measures are implemented.

The European Board for Digital Services had already found X’s action plan overall inadequate before the Commission signed off. That spared X the risk of daily non-compliance fines that could have reached up to 5% of its daily global turnover.