Civil society files joint DSA complaint against X for targeting people with ads using their sensitive personal data
On 14 July 2025, nine organisations — EDRi, AI Forensics, Centre for Democracy & Technology Europe, Entropy, GFF, Global Witness, Panoptykon Foundation, Bits of Freedom and VoxPublic — filed a joint DSA complaint against X with the Digital Services Coordinators of France, Germany and the Netherlands, citing Article 26(3). Using X’s own public Ad Repository, the groups documented advertisers targeting or excluding users via protected categories: Shein targeting far-left political interests, TotalEnergies excluding users interested in ‘ecologist’ content, McDonald’s excluding trade-union members and antidepressant users, and Brussels Signal targeting far-right party sympathisers.
Executive summary
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A nine-organisation coalition led by EDRi mined X’s DSA-mandated Ad Repository, a public transparency tool, to identify advertising campaigns that appeared to target or exclude users based on ‘special category’ data such as political opinion, religion, sexual orientation and health status — categories Article 26(3) of the DSA explicitly bars from ad targeting. The complaint names specific advertisers (Shein, TotalEnergies, McDonald’s, Brussels Signal) as examples pulled directly from the repository’s own disclosures, positioning the filing as a proof-of-concept that ad-repository data can be systematically audited for prohibited targeting rather than relying solely on platform self-reporting. It was lodged with regulators in three member states simultaneously to maximise enforcement pressure.
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