EU Accepts X's DSA Compliance Plan With Six-Month Deadline

A year after the EU handed X its first ever Digital Services Act fine, Brussels has accepted the platform's plan to fix what got it fined. Reuters reported that the European Commission signed off on the action plan on Wednesday, giving Elon Musk's company six months to implement it under an enhanced supervision regime.

The original €120 million penalty, issued in 2025, cited three problems: the deceptive design of the blue checkmark, a lack of transparency around the ad repository, and a failure to give researchers access to public data. The plan the Commission has now accepted works backwards from those three items. X will add search functions to its ad archive, publish more information about individual adverts, and provide access via digital passwords. On the research side, the company has committed to a better screening process for researchers to access public data via its API, free of charge, with significantly reduced application processing times.

What makes this different from an ordinary settlement is the audit clause. Implementation will be checked by an external, independent assessor whose report goes to the Commission, and according to MediaPost any recommendations that assessment produces have to be implemented in full. The Board for Digital Services, the DSA's advisory body, is kept in the loop with regular updates. That combination of enhanced supervision plus a binding audit is the template other very large online platforms should read carefully, because it is what Brussels will likely reach for the next time a DSA obligation is missed.

The honest caveat is that the reporting does not pin down what 'significantly reducing' processing times means in concrete days or weeks, who the independent auditor will be, or how much of the assessment will ever be public. There is also the separate ongoing DSA proceeding against X that this deal does not resolve. Musk himself has been openly hostile to the Commission on the platform he owns; after the 2025 fine he suspended the Commission's advertising account, so a plan on paper and a plan delivered in practice are not the same thing.

If X actually ships what it has agreed to, the concrete winners are the academic and civil-society researchers who have been trying to work with a platform that has made public-data access harder, not easier, and the advertisers who get a more searchable window into where and how ads run.