The European Commission is the latest to launch a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s X amid rising scrutiny of the creation and distribution of deepfakes, this time over systemic risk handling under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The new investigation will assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with deploying Grok's functionalities in X in the EU. This includes risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.
To protect European citizens, the investigation will assess whether X complies with its DSA obligations to diligently assess and mitigate systemic risks, and whether the risk assessment report for Grok’s functionalities was properly conducted and transmitted to the Commission before its deployment.
The investigation will focus on the dissemination of illegal content, content that could have a negative effect in relation to gender-based violence, and content that could have serious negative consequences to physical and mental well-being stemming from deployments of Grok's functionalities into the X platform.
In parallel, the Commission extended its ongoing investigation launched in December 2023 into X's compliance with its recommender systems risk management obligations to establish whether X has properly assessed and mitigated all systemic risks, as defined in the DSA, associated with its recommender systems, including the impact of its recently announced switch to a Grok-based recommender system.
If proven, these failures would constitute infringements of Articles 34(1) and (2), 35(1) and 42(2) of the DSA. This could result in a fine of up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover.
