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Brussels and Elon Musk's X have reached an uneasy truce. The European Commission says it has accepted the platform's action plan to bring it into line with the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU's rulebook for large online platforms — seven months after ruling that X had broken the law and hitting it with a fine.
The deal centres on two things the DSA treats as non-negotiable: transparency about advertising, and outside scrutiny of how the platform works.
Under the plan, X will overhaul its advertising repository with better search and faster response times, publish more detail about the ads it carries, and open the archive up through an API. It will also give "eligible researchers" effective access to public data — speeding up and simplifying the vetting process, dropping the fees, and rewriting its terms so it can no longer contractually forbid researchers from scraping public posts.
That last point matters. Access to platform data is how academics and civil-society groups measure things like disinformation, hate speech and the reach of political content — precisely the "systemic risks" the DSA is meant to police. X has six months to deliver, after which it must commission an independent audit of the changes and hand the results to the Commission.
The agreement was not unanimous inside the EU's own machinery. The Board for Digital Services — which brings together national regulators — gave its opinion on 15 June, calling the proposed changes only "partially adequate" and deeming X's audit measures, and therefore the overall plan, insufficient to fix the breaches.
The Commission accepted the plan regardless, but said it had "carefully considered" the board's criticism and clarified several points X must address as it implements the measures. It promised to monitor progress closely, keep the board and national Digital Services Coordinators updated, and press on the issues the board flagged.
This is the DSA doing what it was designed to do — extract concrete, enforceable commitments from a platform whose owner has made hostility to European regulation a personal brand. But accepting a plan that the EU's own advisers called insufficient is a gamble. If X drags its feet over the next six months, or the audit comes back thin, the Commission will have staked its credibility on a compromise its experts warned against. The real test is not the promise; it is whether Brussels enforces it once the cameras have moved on.
