The European Commission does not designate X as a gatekeeper. The social media company thus escapes the strictest obligations under DMA legislation.
X will not be seen as a gatekeeper under the DMA after all. The European Commission has been investigating the impact the former Twitter is making as a social media platform since May. For X, the decision means it will escape stricter regulation.
“The Commission has concluded that X cannot indeed be considered a gatekeeper with respect to its online social networking service, as the investigation has shown that X is not a major gateway for business users to reach end users,” the Commission wrote in a press release.
Good news for Elon Musk, who is already not so high on European legislation. X threatened to fall under gatekeeper status because it has 45 million active users in the European Union. After the investigation, the Commission concluded that X’s impact on the internal market is “not significant enough” to designate the company as a gatekeeper.
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X seems to have been saved in this investigation by its abominable ad revenue. Since Elon Musk took over the torch at the company, many companies pulled the ad portfolio shut on X, in protest over how Musk handles the platform. Musk also managed to convince the Commission by arguing that he only offers first-party ads and therefore does not collect user data like Google and Meta do.
For now, X escapes, but the company remains on the European Union’s radar. Should advertisers ever return to the platform, that could still affect the conclusion of the investigation. The company is also under increased scrutiny under the DSA legislation and its associated obligations.
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X escapes gatekeeper status under DMA
A select club of tech giants have been designated by the European Union as gatekeepers under the DMA legislation. They include Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon and ByteDance (TikTok), among others.