The European Commission is launching an investigation into X, the social network previously known as Twitter, after finding the company may have breached the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

EU officials announced the move today. It comes about a year and a half after the European Parliament passed the Digital Services Act, or DSA, into law. The DSA requires online platform operators with more than 45 million users in the EU to counter the spread of illegal content on their services.

EU officials are launching the probe into X following a preliminary review that found the company may have breached eight different DSA provisions. Those provisions span five areas: risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.

“The higher the risk large platforms pose to our society, the more specific the requirements of the Digital Services Act are,” said European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager. “We take any breach of our rules very seriously. And the evidence we currently have is enough to formally open a proceeding against X.”

According to the EU, X may have failed to comply with a DSA rule that specifies large online platforms must implement “risk assessment and mitigation measures” to counter the dissemination of illegal content on their services. Additionally, officials found issues in the illegal content “notice and action mechanism” X provides. The DSA requires large platform operators to provide a way for third parties to report illicit user activity.

Another focus of the investigation is X’s Community Notes feature. According to the European Commission, officials will evaluate whether the feature and a number of related company policies are effective at “mitigating risks to civic discourse and electoral processes.”

A second X feature the EU plans to check for DSA compliance is the blue checkmark. The social network displays such a checkmark on the profiles of users who purchase its X Premium subscription, which provides access to an additional set of features for a monthly fee. EU officials will evaluate whether the blue checkmark breaches a DSA provision that focuses on preventing platform operators from implementing deceptive interface designs.

The DSA also requires platform operators to provide researchers with access to certain data, including information on advertiser activity. Companies such as X must maintain a searchable database of the ads they have run in the past year. The European Commission believes the social network may have failed to adequately meet that requirement.

The probe is the first DSA-related investigation that the EU has launched since the legislation was approved by lawmakers last July. If the European Commission finds that X breached the legislation, it can require the company to change the practices that are in violation of regulatory requirements, issue a fine or do both. DSA breaches can carry a fine equal to up to 6% of a company’s global annual revenue.

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