Tangle - The European Union fines X.

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

On Friday, the European Commission (the executive arm of the European Union, or EU) announced that it is fining the social media company X $140 million for breaching transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The European Commission accused the U.S.-based social media company of deceptive use of its “blue checkmark” validation feature, lack of advertisement transparency, and failure to provide access to public data. X owner Elon Musk responded to the European Commission’s announcement of the fine by calling the post “Bullshit.”Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: Do you think the EU’s enforcement is an overreach, or appropriate? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're talking about X versus the European Union. We're going to talk about this fine against the media company formerly known as Twitter and break down arguments from the left and the right about it.

Before we do, though, a quick heads up that. We actually have a correction in yesterday's podcast and newsletter. In our Have a Nice Day section, we identified Anfler, Antler South Dakota. Instead, it was actually supposed to be Antler, North Dakota. Somehow, we publish this error, even though the person responsible for summarizing the story swears that they wrote North Dakota and the section's chief fact checker insists they look the town up on Google Maps, we do not wish to denigrate or erase the peace garden state. Trust me. But it is a frustrating way to end a nearly two-month-long error-free streak. This was our first correction since October 22nd.

It is our 147th correction in our 330-week history. We track those corrections and place them at the top of the podcast in an effort to maximize transparency with our listeners. So if this is the first one you're here and that's why, apologize for the mistake. Also, the other day on the show, this was not an error that was in the newsletter. I accidentally said Donald Trump instead of Harry Truman at one point in the podcast. A couple of people wrote in to point that out. That was my mistake. I apologize for that.

Not going to count it as a correction since it wasn't something that we, like, wrote down and published. I don't know. It's a little bit wishy-washy there, but it was a silly misspeak, I think. And the context, I hope, was clear about who I was talking about. All right, got that out of the way. I'm going to send it over to John for today's show, and I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac. Welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, the Trump administration said it has reached an agreement with seven states to resolve a challenge to the Biden administration's student loan repayment plan, the saving on a valuable education program. The agreement will reportedly require the education department to halt new enrollments in the program, reject pending applications, and gradually remove current enrollees from the program. Number two, a federal judge granted a Justice Department motion to unseal the records of the grand jury investigation.

of Galane Maxwell, a convicted sex offender and longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Number three, the Supreme Court heard arguments in National Republican Senatorial Committee versus Federal Election Commission, a case challenging the limits on what political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. Number four, fighting between Thai and Cambodian forces continued along the border of the two countries, after breaking out over the weekend. Cambodia's military said seven civilians were killed and 20 wounded, while the Thai military said three of its soldiers had been killed. And number five, Australia's social media ban for children under 16 went into effect,

blocking access to platforms like TikTok, meta, YouTube and X. It is the first such ban to be implemented in the world. Today, the commission has issued a third. fine of 120 million euro to X for breaching the Digital Services Act. This is the first ever fine under the DSA. X has indeed breached its transparency obligation under the DSA. This includes X's blue check mark. It deceives users, anyone can pay to obtain the verified status, and X does not meaningfully verify who is behind it. It also includes X's advertising repository, which does not work properly, and X doesn't provide effective data access

for researchers. On Friday, the European Union announced that it is finding the social media company X $140 million for breaching transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act. The European Commission accused the U.S.-based social media company of deceptive use of its blue checkmark validation feature, lack of advertisement transparency, and failure to provide access to public data. Ex-owner Elon Musk responded to the European Commission's announcement of the fine by calling the post bullshit. For context, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, bought the social media application then called Twitter in 2022. Along with renaming the company, Musk introduced a number of changes to the online platform, including overhauling its verification

system, shifting to paid subscriptions, and introducing new features like long-form posts, AI chatbot integration, and user location data. The changes reflect a pivot away from ad-driven revenue and towards subscriptions and AI integration, and the platform has drawn controversy from both users and regulators for allegedly proliferating a rise in bot activity and misinformation. Most recently, Brazil banned X from operating in the country in 2024, but its Supreme Court lifted the ban after X agreed to pay a $5.1 million fine and blocked accounts accused of spreading misinformation. The EU passed the DSA in 2022 to regulate digital companies that operate within the EU's jurisdiction with specific rules for very large online platforms and search engines. Friday's announcement marks the first major sanctions issued by the EU under the new legislation.

The EU regulator said that, along with violating the law's advertisement transparency provisions, ex-violated the DSA by deceiving users into believing accounts had been verified with its blue check system. This deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors, the European Commission said. X objects to the fine and says the EU is overreaching its authority by attempting to regulate a U.S.-based company. X's head product, Nikita Beer, accused the European Commission of taking advantage of an exploit in the platform's advertising system in making its announcement and terminated its ex-account. On Saturday, Musk criticized the European Union further. The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries so that governments can better represent their people, he posted on X.

The EU's fine also drew the ire of top officials within the Trump administration. The European Commission's $140 million fine isn't just an attack on X. It's an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X after the fine was announced. The European Commission defended the fine, saying it represented compliance with its law and not censorship. Today, we'll cover what the left, right, and European writers are saying about the battle between the EU and X, and then Isaac's take.

We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, first of all right, first of let's start with what the left is saying. Many on the left say X's fine is for straightforward infractions, not censorship. Others suggest the EU went too light on the platform for fear of political blowback. In tech policy press, Daphne Keller argued the fine is not about speech or censorship. Don't let anyone, not even the U.S. Secretary of State, tell you that the European Commission's 120 million euro enforcement against Elon Musk's X under the Digital Service Act is about censorship or about what speech users can post on the platform, Keller wrote. The blue checks charge is about consumer deception. X changed the rules about how it does verification in a way that allowed impersonation and

scams to flourish. It's kind of like if a grocery store said it had vetted all the produce in its special blue check section for worms, but then once consumers started relying on that, it actually stopped checking. The ads transparency charge stems from the DSA's requirement that platforms must maintain a public archive showing what ads the platform ran, who paid for them, and other information. X fell drastically short of meeting this requirement, according to EU investigators. The third thing the EU penalized X-FOR is not giving researchers better access to public data, Keller said.

The find announced today is important, mostly because it answers long-standing questions about how aggressively the commission would enforce the DSA in the current transatlantic political climate, but it is also not remotely surprising, given how clearly X was violating some pretty basic legal requirements. In Bloomberg, Parmy Olson said, Musk's $140 million fine shows the EU is losing its nerve. X's dissent into a racist, politically radical hellscape, fueled by porn in recent years, is the predictable outcome of chronic opacity and deliberate obfuscation. X misled users by monetizing its blue checkmarks so anyone could become verified.

It blocked independent researchers from accessing public data and charged prohibitive fees for limited application programming interface access, making it nearly impossible to study misinformation patterns, according to the Commission's findings, Olson wrote. And the company declined to maintain a searchable, reliable advertising database, too, obscuring who is paying what to influence public discourse. The penalty could have been much bigger. The Commission had originally considered calculating a fine

based on Musk's entire private company portfolio, or what the Commission called the Musk Group, to have abandoned a higher number after a two-year investigation, suggests the EU is pulling its punches, Olson said. X was the European Union's first probe under its other new law addressing harmful online content. Now, Europe's handling of this initial case sets the template for its enforcement against TikTok, meta, and others, and its weak response to Musk threatens to undermine the entire regulatory framework. All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying,

which brings us to what the right is saying. Many on the right see the fine as the EU's latest assault on free speech standards. Others suggest Musk is being targeted for his political leanings. The Free Presses editors wrote, Europe's censors put a price on dissent. The stated reasons for the fine are a lack of transparency, a violation of advertising rules, and misleading users with deceptive design.

The real reasons have little to do with those allegations and everything to do with the kind of speech the EU wants to suppress. perspectives that have not been filtered through bureaucrats, academics, or media professionals, views that go against the received wisdom of policymakers, and views that have not been vetted and found to be acceptable by governments, the editors said. The heart of what the EU is investigating is the content that gets posted on X. That was what the EU itself said when it started its Digital Services Act investigation, announcing that it would focus on the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech,

the editors wrote. The stakes here are much larger than the find that the EU wants to, Musk and X to pay. For the U.S. or other American corporations to give in to these kinds of demands would invite nonstop extortion from foreign mandarins. Europe's aim is not to change the color of X's checkmarks. It is to make it more expensive for U.S. companies to allow speech than to restrict it. And not only speech in Europe, but across the world. The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized Europe's Foolish War on X.com. Brussels insists X must make data about advertising on the platform readily available to outsiders and shouldn't use its terms of service

to prohibit data scraping by eligible researchers. The EU claims this open access to X's commercial data is vital to allow researchers and civil society to spot scams and information warfare, the board said. That reference to civil society is a tell. Brussels wants to force X and inevitably other platforms to share data that hostile activists can wield against the platforms in future regulatory actions or litigation, all based on a theory. that European citizens are too dumb to take things that they read on X or elsewhere online with a grain of salt. Musk has become a thorn in the side of many European politicians with his support for insurgent movements in many countries, sometimes to good effect and sometimes for

ill. Insurgent policies are highly effective at using X and other social media to spread their messages. This makes X an inviting target in Brussels, the border route. Europe can't afford any of this, not the censorship of European's own political speech, not the diplomatic battle with Washington, not the war on economically vital data and technology. Earth to Brussels. Are you awake? All right, that is it for what writers from the left in the writer saying, which brings us to what European writers are saying. Some European writers see the backlash to the fine as part of U.S. Conservatives' growing attacks on Europe. Other writers argue the EU is clearly attempting to suppress conservative voices. In the Times, Katie Balls asked, what's behind the Trump administration's

ideological assault on the EU? In February, J.D. Vance used his Munich Security Conference speech to launch an ideological assault on Europe. This month, Elon Musk said the EU should be abolished after its executive branch issued a $140 million fine against Musk's social media platform, Balls, wrote. Some Republicans say this all comes from a good place. It's because they care and stems from anglophilia, a feeling of shared values. As Trump put it this week, when asked about the ex-fine Musk is facing, look, Europe has to be very careful. They're doing a lot of things. We want to keep Europe, Europe. But it's also a useful political device. Talking up Britain and Europe as lost hands could act as a way of warning Americans what might happen if they allow

the left to govern again. How much European leaders have to worry remains in the air? Republicans in Congress could limit some of the powers of the administration on issues like troop withdrawal. Also, if the polls and recent elections are anything to go by, the Democrats could be finding a path to recovery before 2028, all said. But make no mistake, if the populist right stays in power, the criticism and likely actions will only harden after Trump leaves office. In the European Conservative, Lauren Smith wrote, the EU censorship regime is coming for X again.

European Commission tech chief Hannah Virkinin maintains that the DSA is having nothing to do with censorship, but it's hard to imagine what else. else it could be. We need only look at Musk's previous skirmishes with the EU to see that the DSA is clearly intended to have a chilling effect on free speech online, Smith said. Ahead of last year's U.S. presidential election, then internal market commissioner Terry Breton cautioned Musk that streaming his planned Donald Trump interview on X might breach the DSA. That could expose the platform to massive penalties, even the risk of being shut out of the EU entirely. Anyone who has been paying attention since the DSA came into force in 2022 will know that the law is far from neutral.

Rather, it has been routinely weaponized against the EU's critics, especially from the right, Smith wrote. Just look at how the DSA handles elections and crisis moments. The Commission's election risk guidance asks very large platforms to anticipate and mitigate threats to electoral processes and civil discourse during specific campaign periods. This effectively pushes them to preempt information manipulation before it spreads, and inevitably catches lawful but politically inconvenient views. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take.

I have no love lost for X. Over the last few years, the platform has gone through a roller coaster of ups and downs. When I started my career in journalism, Twitter was my favorite social media application. It was an awesome way to debate smart people in public and get the fastest breaking news updates in the world. But when it throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story

and disingenuously framed it as Russian propaganda, I strongly criticized it. When Elon Musk was supposed to join the board, I supported his push to add ideological diversity to the platform. When Musk bought the platform outright, I worried about the richest man in the world forcing the purchase of such a critical source of information. When Musk began very obviously thumbing the algorithmic scales to promote his worldview and selectively nuked accounts, I again vocally criticized the platform. Today, X's assess pool. It is overrun with bots, misinformation, porn, and bigotry. The community note system remains helpful but is far too slow to be effective in raining in misinformation. too many users delegate their thinking to Grock, which is clearly an unreliable arm of

must own beliefs. Elon himself promised to quote-unquote fix it when it started giving answers he didn't like, which is all just to say, I'm not the person you might expect to be defending X right now, even though I once believed in Musk and once loved the platform. And yet, I also think Europe's enforcement of these rules and its trajectory more broadly is deeply concerning. Whenever we cover the Trump administration, we often face the criticism that you can't look at the president's individual actions in a vacuum, but have to look at the hole. That's true. Fitting pieces together shows a more complete picture, which was the underpinning of my piece, yes, things are pretty bad right now. The fundamental context of this enforcement, which has to be

explicated up front, is that Europe is backsliding in genuinely horrifying ways on speech rights. The Digital Services Act is the latest government overreach, but it's part of the government. of a frightening trend. In the UK, thousands of people are being arrested each year for statements on social media. In Germany, online hate speech can bring the police to your door, and politicians can sue Germans for criticizing them. In France, laws narrowing online rights have proliferated. We see these attacks on speech pop up in the U.S. from the left and the right, but they are much rare and face far more backlash. In Europe, the DSA is an important piece of this picture, an enforcement mechanism not just for the continent, but apparently the globe.

And this is its first major enforcement. Remember that last year, before the U.S. presidential race, then Commissioner Terry Breton threatened Musk, telling him that if he live-streamed an interview with Donald Trump on X, it could violate the DSA. Months ago, Musk alleged that the EU's bureaucratic arm was offering him a secret deal to drop the case in exchange for the platform censoring forms of speech.

Musk didn't specify, but the claim seems more applauded. after the EU struck deals with TikTok and Facebook. All of this makes the criticisms Vice President J.D. Vance and Musk have leveled at Europe much more plausible. There are allies and democratic peers, but if these kinds of draconian stances on speech spread to the United States, they could cause social upheaval. All of this is the context leading to the EU's fine. An ex's supposed transgression? First, that its blue checkmark policy purportedly violated the DSA because it might confuse users about which accounts are verified. The symbol represented external identity verification years ago,

but the platform has not been ambiguous about how to get a verification checkmark now. You pay for it. I hate this change, and I think it's partially how Musk ruined the platform. But do I think it should be illegal for a private company to change this feature? No, I don't. Am I confused about what that checkmark means? No, I'm not. And I don't think many users are. Another of X's alleged crimes is that it has not met the DSA's standard for advertising transparency. The DSA requires companies to maintain an easily searchable publicly available archive of who bought ads and what the ad's content was, who the ads targeted, the legal name of the entity paying for the ad, and how many users the ad reached, among other things.

Easily tracking how money flows on a platform like X has clear upside, but demanding that data be widely accessible is an incredible overreach. Advertising data is exactly the kind of proprietary information that makes X valuable, and for advertisers, it's the kind of thing you intentionally keep private to have an advantage on your competition, which, by the way, means that this action, supposedly targeting a tech behemoth, will have consequences for countless smaller players. For example, if my team came up with a brilliant strategy to advertise angle on X, I wouldn't want our timing, location, and price points to be shared widely in a place where our competitors could mimic or steal the strategy for their own gain. Yet this is what the

DSA demands of X. The final allegation against X is that it is not meeting the DSA's transparency requirements because it's too hard for researchers to access data posted publicly on the platform. Specifically, the EU claims X's terms of service forbid researchers from using a method called scraping to access public data. That's using scripts that visit web pages and get relevant information from the site's HTML, and then it puts up bureaucratic hurdles and delays for researchers who want to access that data through permitted channels.

At base, I feel that X is within its rights here on the terms of service. If Tangle became the most well-read news out in the world, and researchers wanted to scrape our comments section to study our readers, I think I should be able to make terms of service that make that more difficult. But putting aside the question of why these researchers should have the right to access that public data of a private company, the complaint itself seems like an incredibly subjective standard right for abuse. Some commentators defending DSA argued that this law was similar to the U.S. Reform Accountability and Transparency Act, PADA, which was introduced on a bipartisan basis

in 2023. The difference, obviously, is that Pata is a narrow regulation that also didn't become law, not a part of a massive regulatory framework, empowering an oversight commission to fine or shut down platforms. Under the DSA, the EU can ignore difficulties posed by one company while easily tacking on a claim that another made accessing data too hard to some other allegations, which, in my opinion, is happening here. So has X violated the DSA? The EU says yes, and maybe they did. We haven't seen the evidence, and X hasn't yet had the opportunity to defend itself. They could appeal, but it's not clear if they will. Even presuming X violated the rules, though, the issue isn't X's policies. It's the law itself. In tech policy press,

Daphne Keller, under what the left is saying, summed all this up with the cheeky, that's it. that's everything X is in trouble for under the DSA, at least for now. But that's not it. The same bill being enforced now also gives the EU enforcement power to compel companies like X to hand over internal data, which Keller herself acknowledges just sentences before. Plus, Europe has two other investigations open against X, including one for illegal content under the DSA,

which would open the door to the EU restricting speech that is legal in the U.S. Now, X has three months to hand over an action plan, explaining how it will address these infringements, all with the other open investigations or face a potential $140 million fine. Perhaps for people who loathecks are furious at Musk and despise online hate speech, I'm all three, it feels nice to watch someone throw a punch at the platform.

But trust me, when I say, we should not want any government in charge of regulating speech in the modern-day public square, but especially not these governments. In Germany, insulting a politician can get you three years in prison. In France, a woman is on trial on facing $14,000 fine for calling Emmanuel Macron filth in a Facebook post. Believing this enforcement against the U.S. tech company has nothing to do with speech rights requires head-in-the-sand levels of denial, no different than thinking Trump's test run of National Guard troops in D.C. wasn't going to be expanded across the country.

At the very least, we should all be deeply alarmed that a European enforcement agency, some of whose members won't tolerate insulting public officials, is now reaching into the U.S. to, dictate how a major social media platform here is run. If we're lucky, X will fight and win. Not because they're the good guys, but because they have every right to run a crappy, hard-to-analyze platform full of angry and bittered users if that's what they want to do. All right, that is it for my take. There are two staff dissents today, one from senior editor Will Kayback, one from managing editor Ari Weitzman.

You can ignore them. These guys don't know what they're talking about. No, I'm just kidding. All right, first up, here's Will. Hi, this is Senior Editor Will Kayback, reading my dissent to Isaac's take. I disagree with many of the DSA's provisions, and I would oppose similar laws here in the U.S. But I'm not particularly alarmed by the EU's fines against X. The platform can challenge the penalty in court, which it seems likely to do.

And if the EU's rules become too disruptive for the platform, it can always shut down its European operations, and lobby EU citizens to elect politicians who will change the law. Obviously, that would be a scandalous proposition for Europe, and I don't desire that happening, but I don't think there's any risk of a similar regulation taking hold in the U.S. All right, now I'm going to pass it over to Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, who had a separate dissent. This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with my staff dissent today.

I think the EU's third accusation against X is valid, and I disagree that companies have, have a right to prevent data scraping. Yes, in the absence of a specific law that prevents companies from banning the practice in their terms of service, the DSA can be unevenly enforced. But the solution to that problem should be to write that law. Why should I be able to enter data I manually read into a spreadsheet, but disallowed from writing a script to do the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to me. We'll be right back after this quick break.

All right, that is it for my take and the staff dissents from Will and Ari. We're skipping the audience question today, so I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under-the-radar story for today, folks. On Thursday, the Journal of the American Medical Association Network published the results of a large-scale study in France on the safety and efficacy of MRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The study followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals

for approximately four years and found that the vaccinated group had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and a 25% lower risk of death of any cause. Separately, the vaccinated group was 15% less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than the unvaccinated group. The study's authors said the results offer significant new support for the safety of those vaccines with potential applications beyond COVID-19. Reason has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of European Parliament members who voted in favor of the Digital Services Act in July 22 was 539. The number of European Parliament members who voted against the DSA was 54. The maximum percent of a company's

global revenue that the EU can fine for violations of the DSA is 6%. The number of days X has to implement changes to address issues flagged by the EU in its fine or risk additional penalties is 90 days. The approximate amount that the EU find meta in July for alleged antitrust violations is $232 million. The approximate amount that the EU find Apple in July for alleged antitrust Antitrust violations is $580 million. According to a March 2025 UGov survey, 63% of citizens in France, 59% of citizens in Germany, and 49% of citizens in Spain say that the EU's enforcement of laws addressing big tech's influence and power is too relaxed, while 7% of citizens in France, 8% of citizens in Germany, and 9% of citizens in Spain say that the EU's enforcement of laws addressing big tech's influence and power is too strict. And last but not least, R. Have a Nice Day Story. While traveling for work in 2022, TV host and nursing mother, Emily Calendrelli, faced a problem.

A frozen gel pack she needed to store her breast milk had thawed, and the TSA told her to throw it out or check it. After sharing her story online, Calendrelli learned that she wasn't the only mother who faced similar problems with the TSA, and that those problems sometimes threaten women's health and the safety of their breast milk. She began lobbying Congress for clearer protocol that would protect women's ability to travel in airports with breastfeeding equipment. Her activism gained traction and eventually produced the bipartisan Babes Enhancement Act, which passed Congress with unanimous support and was signed into law in late November. Forbes has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description.

All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership they get to a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saw, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership,

please visit our website at reetangle.com.