X has terminated the European Commission's ad account after Brussels used it to post a video announcing the platform's €120 million Digital Services Act (DSA) fine – which was in fact just a link to the press release.
Elon Musk's social media mouthpiece received the first ever DSA fine last week: a €120 million penalty for breaching rules on ad transparency, data access for researchers, and the revamped blue checkmark system.
Head of product Nikita Bier, who recently unveiled X's controversial profile location functionality, decried the "irony" of the EC's announcement, saying: "You logged into your dormant ad account to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer — to post a link that deceives users into thinking it's a video and to artificially increase its reach."
According to Bier, this is against the rules. "X believes everyone should have an equal voice on our platform," he said, telling the European Commission's X presence that its ad account had been terminated.
In a later post, he noted that the EC had not run an ad since 2021 and that the exploit had since been patched. The Register asked the EC to comment, but has yet to receive a response.
The exploit, which sounds like it's potentailly by design or perhaps the result of sloppy coding, involves crafting an ad with a link that previews as a video. In this instance, the EC used a dormant ad account, which fired up an older version of the Ad Composer tool, and hijinks ensued.
According to Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok: "It's unlikely EU officials maintained a dormant account for years specifically to exploit this vulnerability... More probable: they used an existing account opportunistically when the chance arose."
Bier said: "It has never been abused like this. It is now patched."
Indeed, we're sure the exploit has never before been used by the EC to post an announcement video of a fine for X that doubles as a link to the release itself.
The EC gave X 60 working days to explain how it intends to deal with its blue checkmark practices and 90 days to address concerns over ads and researcher access. ®
Source: The register