But the European Commission says it doesn’t pay for ads on X anyway – a Commission policy it has maintained for more than two years.
According to an Beers says there is an exploit in
The irony of your announcement:
You logged in to your inactive advertising account to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer – to post a link that tricks users into thinking it’s a video and artificially increases its reach.
As you may know, X believes that everyone should… https://t.co/ziuhUOimOT
– Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) 6 December 2025
The European Commission’s post has a video:
Today, we fined X for non-compliance with transparency obligations under the DSA.
We are holding X responsible for:
🔹The misleading design of its ‘blue checkmark’
🔹Lack of transparency in its advertising stock
🔹Failure to provide access to public data for researchers– European Commission (@EU_Commission) 5 December 2025
However, the European Commission announced a policy of no advertising on X in 2023, as well as suspending all other paid services, a Commission spokesperson told Gizmodo. “The suspension is still in effect,” the spokesperson said.
The European Commission’s post initially appears to be an overlaid play button, but it autoplays a video – and that’s not dissimilar to the puzzling way video posts on the X work under normal circumstances, like in this video post from Kawasaki. In our tests, the play/pause function implied by the play button image on commission posts on desktop worked normally.
However, on mobile, the play/pause function is broken in our tests. Instead of pausing the video, it takes the user to the European Commission’s press release about the fine against X. It is unclear whether this issue is related to Nikita Bear of X or not. Gizmodo reached out to X multiple times for clarity, but did not receive a response.
According to a Commission spokesperson, “The Commission is only using tools that the platforms themselves are making available to our corporate accounts – this was the case with the ‘post composer’ tool in X.” Post Composer is an advertising-oriented feature that lives under the “X Business” umbrella.
“We expect these tools to be fully compliant with the platforms’ own terms and conditions as well as our legislative framework,” the spokesperson said.
When asked, the Commission did not clarify how it was accessing Post Composer if it was not paying for the premium features, nor whether it still had access to them despite the ban claims issued by Beer. The Commission’s X account has a gray checkmark, which is the verification badge for “governments and multilateral organizations.” According to X, “Some of these accounts may be given memberships to premium organizations.” Two months ago, X added further complexity by subdividing premium organizations into “premium businesses” and “premium organizations.”
At any rate, the Commission spokesperson claimed in his comment that the Commission “always uses all social media platforms in good faith.”
If Gizmodo receives more clarity from the Commission or X, we will update this post.
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