An incoming privacy policy update to Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) will see the company making it clearer to users in the European Union that they have the right to appeal decisions under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), such as account bans, content takedowns and shadowbanning.
The online governance regulation, which applies on scores of services and platforms operating across the bloc, carries stiff penalties for breaches — of up to 6% of global annual turnover so there’s high regulatory risk for anyone flouting the rules.
In a summary of DSA-related changes that X said will take effect on November 15, 2024 alongside other ToS and privacy policy updates, the company wrote: “[I]f you are a recipient of the X service in the European Union, we’ve updated our ‘Summary of Terms’ to help you understand you may challenge certain decisions we make under the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) via our internal process or out-of-court dispute settlement as described here.”
X’s note links to a page with further information about EU users’ decision appeals rights — including the company stipulating that users “are entitled to select any out-of-court dispute settlement body certified by the Digital Services Coordinator in the relevant Member State of the EU to resolve a dispute relating to any such decision”.
The DSA requires that in-scope services engage with certified bodies to arbitrate disputes “in good faith” when a user requests they do so. Although the law does not make these bodies’ decisions binding on regulated services, as X’s user memo also notes.
X’s DSA info page also flags up a link to a web form hosted within its Help Center where EU users can submit appeals about illegal content decisions directly to X.
Shadowbanning enforcement
The social media platform has already been successfully sued over shadowbanning by an individual based in the Netherlands (PhD candidate at Leiden University, Danny Mekić) — whose DSA complaints included not being notified of the account restrictions applied to him; not being given a statement of reasons why X had limited his account visibility; and not being provided with a point of contact to appeal its decisions.
But while Mekić prevailed on these complaints in court in the Netherlands in July — and on a separate data-related complaint brought against X under the bloc’s privacy framework, the GDPR — wider DSA enforcement has yet to bite on X.
The European Commission does have multiple open investigations against Musk’s company, though. And its first bundle of DSA probes on X, announced back in December 2023, include scrutiny of its policies and practices around illegal content notices and complaint handling. So X’s privacy policy updates in this area are likely to be related to all this enforcement activity.
The EU went on to lay out an initial set of DSA grievances on X this summer. The first three suspected breaches don’t concern the decision appeal issue — but it’s likely the bloc will have more grievances to present in the coming weeks/months as it works through its other investigations.
Reached for comment on X’s latest updates, Mekić pointed out the company still has a legal obligation to notify EU users who are affected by actions like shadowbanning — as he was.
“I’m happy to see that Twitter [X] finally started to take steps to comply with the DSA and gives the many users they shadowban the possibility to appeal. However, before people can appeal, they need to be aware of any limitations of the visibility of their information, such as a specific message or their (full) profile,” he told TechCrunch.
“I hope Twitter will also start complying with the DSA in the sense that they need to proactively inform users of such limitations, as is required under Article 17 DSA, so that users are actually aware of the measure they want to appeal to –and that the European regulators will strictly enforce this obligation that Twitter so far, also according to the Amsterdam District Court, has been failing to comply with.”
X was contacted with questions about its policy changes but at the time of writing the company had not responded.
We have also contacted the Commission for a progress update on its DSA investigations of X — the first of which was opened almost exactly ten months ago.
