The European Commission just recently slapped Elon Musk’s X with a historic $140 million fine.
But, it turns out that Europe hit X with a double whammy here. According to X, the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU that enforces its laws, took advantage of a flaw in its advertising platform which helped further spread the reach of the EU’s announcement that it was fining X.
As a result, X’s head of product Nikita Bier is escalating the company’s feud with the EU, saying that X has terminated the European Commissions’ advertising account with X.
What happened?
On Friday, the European Commission’s official account shared a post on X announcing the fine, which is the very first penalty issued as a result of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
The fine was issued against X, formerly Twitter, due to a number of changes the platform implemented after Musk acquired the company. The European Commission announcement says it doled out the penalty as a result of X’s “deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”
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“Bullshit,” Musk replied on X to the announcement.
However, days later Bier posted on X to share that Musk’s company was closing the European Commission’s ad account on the platform. Bier says that the European Commission exploited the platform’s Ad Composer by using a feature that’s only meant for ads.
The Ad Composer allows advertisers to upload a video to a post while also linking the video itself to a third-party website. When using this feature, a user is sent to a linked webpage when clicking on the video.
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“You logged into your dormant ad account to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer — to post a link that deceives users into thinking it’s a video and to artificially increase its reach,” Bier wrote. “Your ad account has been terminated.”
Under Musk, X’s algorithm has been updated to give posts that include video uploads an advantage by extending their reach on the platform.
Bier went on to claim that the post format is only meant for ads and that the flaw had never been abused before. Bier says the exploit has since been patched.
It’s unclear exactly how this affects the European Commission, as Bier claimed the now-banned ad account had not run a paid advertisement since 2021, and the exploit no longer exists.
