By launching a heavily criticized paid verification tool without notifying the lead data protection authority in advance despite earlier promising to do so, Twitter has raised fresh regulatory concerns in the European Union.
Twitter Blue offers users access to several extra features, including the ability to edit tweets, undo tweets, and receive prioritized ranking in conversations, as well as the ability to pay to get a blue checkmark on their accounts that mimics the appearance of the legacy verification feature the platform offered before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company last year.
Helen Dixon, Ireland’s commissioner for data protection, told Reuters: The team is a little more cautious this week now that those who see that the blue tick monthly subscription is rolling out here in EU countries are experiencing reassurance that it wasn’t going to roll out in the EU and definitely not before there have been conversations with our office.
The information given by Data Protection Commission (DPC) says that it is still speaking with Twitter about the issue but refuses to provide any more comments.
The updated membership service was introduced soon after Musk took control of the business last autumn after the new billionaire broom promised to make the blue checkmarks accessible for a fee. Though, Musk was compelled to stop the launch when verification pandemonium broke out.
To address the widespread impersonation that had greeted v1, the product was reintroduced in December, originally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Twitter has since continued to open out Blue to more users. The subscription service became available to consumers in Japan in January.
Then, in the first few days of February, it was made available to more paying users, including the first nations of the European Union and other foreign users from Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. So, it took the DPC almost a month to recognize that an EU deployment was taking place without the promised notice.
