The US government wants to join Elon Musk and X's legal challenge to the European Commission's €120 million fine against the social media platform.
The Commission issued its first fine under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in December 2025, finding that X had breached transparency rules through its paid blue checkmarks, advertising repository, and restrictions on researchers' access to public data.
X owner Elon Musk described the decision as "crazy" and "insane" in a Xeet, and compared the "woke" Commission to "Stasi commissars," combining two rather different authoritarian references.
Before issuing a response, he shared the comments made by FCC chair Brendan Carr, who accused "Europe" of "fining a successful US tech company for being a successful US tech company."
"Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe's own suffocating regulations," Carr added.
US politicians also rallied around Musk. Senator Ted Cruz called the fine "an abomination" and an attack on American free speech.
The US government has now applied to intervene in the cases brought by Musk and X Internet and X Holdings, supporting their attempts to annul the Commission's decision.
Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate accused the Commission of regulatory overreach against US companies beyond its jurisdiction.
"The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction," he said.
"We will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory overreach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth."
The Justice Department said it has "significant concerns" about how the Commission determined which people and companies constituted the provider of X's digital service. It intends to argue that the decision conflicts with accepted limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction and the principle that companies are ordinarily legally distinct from their owners and shareholders.
It was especially concerned that the Commission's approach "extended legal scrutiny to Mr Musk himself as a private individual" and implicated other US companies under his control.
According to the DoJ, the Commission found the parties jointly and severally liable for the €120 million fine and calculated it using the worldwide turnover of the corporate group ultimately controlled by Musk. The US government argues that allowing this approach to stand could have broader consequences for American-owned digital platforms operating in the EU.
The DoJ stated: "If the approach in the European Commission Decision is upheld, this may have significant implications for 'very large online platforms' and other similar entities operating in the digital services sector within the EU, many of which are domiciled (at parent level) within the United States.
"The United States looks forward to the opportunity to address these concerns and issues in detail before the General Court."
Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently replaced its identity-based verification system with a subscription offering. Blue checkmarks, previously awarded by Twitter to accounts it considered authentic and notable, became available to paying users without equivalent identity checks. The change swiftly produced impersonation and spam, and the Commission concluded that presenting those accounts as "verified" amounted to deceptive design.
The violations behind the EU fine are separate from matters under investigation in the UK, including X's handling of illegal hate speech and terrorist content flowing through its feeds and Grok's highly controversial nudifying functionality.
The Commission has since accepted X's plan to address the advertising repository and researcher access violations. The €120 million penalty and the legal theory used to calculate and impose it remain the subjects of the challenges now before the General Court – and, if its application succeeds, of an intervention by the US government. ®