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LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday fined X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations, in a move that risks rekindling tensions with Washington over free speech.

The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA.

It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.

READ MORE: France will investigate Musk’s Grok after AI chatbot posted Holocaust denial claims

The Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said it was punishing X because of three different breaches of the DSA’s transparency requirements. The decision could rile President Donald Trump, whose administration has lashed out at digital regulations, complained that Brussels was targeting U.S. tech companies and vowed to retaliate.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on his X account that the Commission’s fine was akin to an attack on the American people. Musk later agreed with Rubio’s sentiment.

“The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Rubio wrote. “The days of censoring Americans online are over.”

Vice President JD Vance, posting on X ahead of the decision, accused the Commission of seeking to fine X “for not engaging in censorship.”

“The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” he wrote.

Officials denied the rules were intended to muzzle Big Tech companies. The Commission is “not targeting anyone, not targeting any company, not targeting any jurisdictions based on their color or their country of origin,” spokesman Thomas Regnier told a regular briefing in Brussels. “Absolutely not. This is based on a process, democratic process.”

X did not respond immediately to an email request for comment.

EU regulators had already outlined their accusations in mid-2024 when they released preliminary findings of their investigation into X.

Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because on “deceptive design practices” and could expose users to scams and manipulation.

Before Musk acquired X, when it was previously known as Twitter, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts, such as Beyonce, Pope Francis, writer Neil Gaiman and rapper Lil Nas X.

After he bought it in 2022, the site started issuing the badges to anyone who wanted to pay $8 per month.

That means X does not meaningfully verify who’s behind the account, “making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with,” the Commission said in its announcement.

X also fell short of the transparency requirements for its ad database, regulators said.

Platforms in the EU are required to provide a database of all the digital advertisements they have carried, with details such as who paid for them and the intended audience, to help researches detect scams, fake ads and coordinated influence campaigns. But X’s database, the Commission said, is undermined by design features and access barriers such as “excessive delays in processing.”

Regulators also said X also puts up “unnecessary barriers” for researchers trying to access public data, which stymies research into systemic risks that European users face.

“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA protects users,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement.

The Commission also wrapped up a separate DSA case Friday involving TikTok’s ad database after the video-sharing platform promised to make changes to ensure full transparency.

AP Writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

By Vivien Lou Chen

Instead of falling as Wall Street braces for another Fed rate cut next week, the 10-year Treasury yield rose 12 basis points for the week to almost 4.14%, the most since April

Recent U.S. economic data has bond-market participants uncertain about the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates next year.

In a bad sign for anyone looking for a reprieve from higher borrowing costs, longer-dated U.S. government debt sold off sharply this week.

The 10-year note and 30-year bond had their worst weekly performances since April and May on conflicting economic data that is sowing doubts about how much the Federal Reserve can cut interest rates in 2026.

Traders widely expect a quarter-point rate cut next week that will push the central bank’s main policy target down to between 3.5% and 3.75%. But they were less certain about next year and see a decent chance that the central bank won’t cut rates again through next March.

Benchmark yields are significant to households, businesses and governments because they influence the cost of borrowing on everything from mortgages, auto loans and credit cards to capital projects, while also affecting interest payments on the national debt.

On Friday, the 10-year Treasury yield BX:TMUBMUSD10Y rose 12 basis points for the week to almost 4.14%, the most for any week since April, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The yield on the 30-year bond BX:TMUBMUSD30Y advanced by a similar amount to almost 4.8%, the biggest weekly increase since May. Yields move in the opposite direction to prices, so a rise in these rates is a reflection of the selloffs that took place in the underlying government maturities.

“Yields are heading back to the higher end of the range that we’ve seen since summer,” said Tom Nakamura, a currency strategist and co-head of fixed income at AGF Investments in Toronto, which had almost $43.6 billion (C$60.4 billion) in assets under management and fee-earning assets as of November.

“One of the things driving this is some of the economic data, like jobless claims and University of Michigan consumer sentiment, which are showing resilience and may curtail the Fed from easing much further,” he said.

Data released on Thursday showed initial jobless claims fell to a more than three-year low of 191,000 in the week that ended Nov. 29. On Friday, the University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment reading inched up by 2.3 points to 53.3 for December, and the rate of U.S. inflation based on the personal consumption expenditures index for September remained stable.

On a more downbeat note, however, payroll processor ADP reported that privately run businesses eliminated 32,000 jobs in November, for the biggest decline since the spring of 2023.

Meanwhile, bond traders are keeping an eye on rising Japanese yields and the possibility of a rate hike by the Bank of Japan later this month. Concerns are that Japan’s bond-market developments, triggered by worries over economic-stimulus efforts under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, might lead to higher yields in the U.S.

Read: Investors are worrying about potential spillover from surging Japanese bond yields. Here’s a breakdown of what matters.

“Globally, we’re seeing some pressure on bonds from fiscal policy – for example, in Japan, with yields on Japanese government bonds rising because the country’s fiscal policy is seen as adding to inflation concerns,” Nakamura said via phone. “The market will tend to focus on fiscal concerns in waves. And as they get highlighted in one market, this tends to shine a light on others as well, particularly in countries where fiscal policy has been more stimulative, such as the U.S.”

On Friday, 1- through 30-year yields finished broadly higher. All three major U.S. stock indexes ended in the green, with the S&P 500 SPX and Nasdaq COMP each securing a fourth day of gains.

-Vivien Lou Chen

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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