The European Union fined Elon Musk’s X platform about $140 million for what it sees as breaches of the bloc’s landmark digital-content law, the first ever penalty it has handed out under the legislation.

The European Commission said Friday that X broke the Digital Services Act after a broad, yearslong probe into how the social network operates. The commission alleged the design of X’s blue-check-mark system deceives users and falls foul of the rules. It also said that the platform’s advertising transparency and data access rules were in breach of the law.

The commission—the EU’s executive arm—is still scrutinizing X over the possible spread of illegal content and its measures to deal with information manipulation.

The fine is the first the commission has handed out under the DSA, legislation that obliges tech companies to do more to increase transparency and safeguard against harmful content on large online platforms like social networks and search engines.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Separately, the commission said ByteDance’s TikTok submitted binding concessions to settle an earlier EU grievance linked to its advertising transparency.

Companies can potentially receive fines of up to 6% of their annual worldwide revenue for breaching the DSA’s rules, with periodic payments incurred for continued noncompliance.

Of the total 120-million-euro fine, equivalent to $139.7 million, X’s blue-check system incurred the largest penalty at €45 million, an EU official said. In late 2022, Musk’s company began charging users to mark their accounts with a blue check, replacing Twitter’s legacy verification system.

The commission said that makes it harder for users to work out whether the users they are engaging with are genuine, exposing them to potential scams. The DSA prevents online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, though it doesn’t force them to verify all users.

“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU,” Henna Virkkunen, the bloc’s top tech enforcer, said in a statement.

As well as the blue-tick issue, the commission said that X’s advertising repository—a type of database platforms are obliged to set up under the rules—fails to meet its transparency requirements. It also said that X doesn’t fully allow researchers to access the website’s public data, another requirement of the law.

Ahead of the EU announcement, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said late Thursday that a fine would penalize the X platform for not engaging in what he called censorship. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” he said in a post on X.

X now has 60 working days to come up with an offer to change how its blue-check-mark system runs to appease EU officials, and 90 working days to come up with a solution for its ad-transparency and data-access policy, the commission said.