The US government has thrown its weight behind Elon Musk’s bid to overturn a €120m (£105m) EU fine against X, filing an application with the European Union’s General Court seeking to intervene in the case.
The dispute centres on X’s blue tick badges. In December 2025 the European Commission said the platform “deceives users” by letting people pay for a verified check mark without “meaningfully verifying” who is behind each account. US Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate said on Thursday that the commission had “inappropriately attempted” to extend its reach to American companies beyond its jurisdiction, as the BBC reports.
Washington’s filing leans on a section of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the EU that allows a state to intervene in disputes when it can show an interest in the outcome. The Department of Justice said the US “has a clear interest” in making sure any ruling is consistent with how territorial jurisdiction is understood in international law, and that it does not want US digital services that “contribute significantly” to its economy to be prejudiced.
Brussels is not blinking. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told a briefing on Friday that the executive was “ready to defend” its position and believes it has a “solid case” under the Digital Services Act. The commission’s tech sovereignty chief Henna Virkkunen said when the fine landed that regulators were “holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability”. Beyond the badges, the EU has also taken issue with X’s advertising transparency and its refusal to give researchers access to public data.
We read the filings so readers do not have to, and the interesting part here is the shape of the argument. This is not simply Musk contesting a penalty; it is the US state formally challenging the EU’s power to regulate American platforms over European users, a question that sits behind the Digital Markets Act and every other Brussels tech file. A court that accepts the intervention argument would be conceding, in effect, that Washington gets a seat at the table when EU rules bite US firms.
For UK businesses that run marketing on X the practical stakes are lower, but the precedent is not. Britain writes its own online safety and platform rules, and a successful US challenge to extraterritorial enforcement in Europe tends to embolden similar arguments elsewhere.
The General Court has yet to rule on whether the US may intervene. X has appealed the fine in full.