X’s Head of Product Nikita Bier fired again on the European Fee this weekend after the EC fined the social media company €120 million (round $140 million).

In its first wonderful beneath the European Union’s Digital Services Act, the fee known as X’s blue checkmark system “misleading” and mentioned the paid verification system makes customers weak to impersonation and scams. The fee additionally mentioned X’s promoting repository failed to satisfy the DSA’s necessities for transparency and accessibility.

The fee mentioned that X should reply inside 60 days to its considerations about blue checkmarks, and inside 90 days to the advert transparency violations, or it may face extra penalties.

After the wonderful was introduced, X proprietor Elon Musk described it as “bullshit” and in addition posted, “How lengthy earlier than the EU is gone? AbolishTheEU”.

Now it appears X has penalized the fee’s account on the platform — not, the corporate says, due to the wonderful, however quite the fee’s use of X’s promoting system.

Quoting the commission’s post saying the wonderful, X’s Bier accused the EC of logging right into a “dormant advert account to reap the benefits of an exploit in our Advert Composer — to publish a hyperlink that deceives customers into considering it’s a video and to artificially improve its attain.”

“As you could remember, X believes everybody ought to have an equal voice on our platform,” Bier wrote. “Nonetheless, it appears you consider that the principles mustn’t apply to your account.”

In consequence, he mentioned the fee’s advert account had been “terminated.” Bier subsequently said the exploit “has by no means been abused like this” and has since been patched.

A European Fee spokesperson informed TechCrunch that the fee “all the time makes use of all social media platforms in good religion.”

⁠”The Fee is just utilizing the instruments that platforms themselves are making out there to our company accounts — this was the case with the ‘Submit Composer’ device in X,” the spokesperson mentioned. “⁠We anticipate these instruments to be totally consistent with the platforms’ personal phrases and situations, in addition to with our legislative framework.”

The spokesperson added that the fee suspended paid promoting on X in October 2023, and that suspension stays in impact.

This publish has been up to date with feedback from a European Fee spokesperson.