76 million attempts to scam you on X, using celebrities

These ads go against X’s policies and may be considered illegal content

The scam consists of three steps: promoted posts with images of well-known celebrities that catch the users’ attention, websites that impersonate media outlets with false interviews that provide credibility, and entities that offer false investments to obtain users’ personal data or money.

By consulting experts, we have been able to examine the different regulations that could qualify these publications as illegal content.

Firstly, these ads could be violating Spanish regulations because:

• They aim to deceive users so they could be considered misleading and unfair advertising and, therefore, illegal, according to the General Advertising Law and the Unfair Competition Law.
• They promote supposed investment services while the Securities Markets and Investment Services Law specifies that the platform must ensure that advertisers have an authorization to provide investment services that neither Quantum AI nor Crypto Twitter have.
• They include the image of famous people for advertising purposes without their consent. This use would be illegitimate according to the Civil Protection Law of the right to honor, personal and family privacy and one’s own image.

Additionally, advertisers must comply with X’s policies to use their promotion service. On numerous occasions, these publications appear to violate the platform’s internal policies. For example, policies prohibit “unacceptable” business practices, misleading and deceptive advertising, or posts that seek to obtain unfair advantage.

X’s obligations and recommendations

Not only are regulations applicable to those who publish fraudulent ads, but also to X as the online platform hosting them. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) establishes that the social network has the responsibility and duty to remove the illicit content it hosts if it becomes aware of it.

Exploitation of X’s advertising system to promote illegal content may constitute a systemic risk under the DSA. If so, this same regulation obliges the platform to take specific measures to end this problem. As of today, X is not responding effectively, since this type of post continues to be spread widely through X Ads in Spain and other countries. Meanwhile, X obtains economic benefit through the payment of X Premium and the investment in the promotion of fraudulent tweets.

Among the recommendations included in the report, it is mentioned that X should increase its investment in content moderation teams with adequate knowledge of languages ​​and local contexts and improve detection processes to prevent ads against its policies from being approved and starting to circulate.

Additionally, the platform’s ad repository should expand the information it offers. It currently has “deficiencies”, as pointed out by the European Commission with the opening of a formal procedure against X under the DSA.

Authorities should also ensure that current laws are complied with, through the collaboration of experts and civil society organizations that can carry out independent investigations.

You can read the full report through this link.