A Berlin court has ordered X to hand over data on Hungarian election activity to researchers, ruling in favor of Democracy Reporting International after the platform refused the group’s access requests in November.
The ruling turns on the EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to give external researchers access to data for scrutiny of election interference risks. X ignored that obligation. The European Commission fined it €40 ($47) million for that refusal, as part of a broader €120 ($141) million levy, in December.
X’s position throughout has been straightforward: don’t share the data. No response to press inquiries, no compliance, no engagement.
Hungary votes in April in what amounts to a test of Viktor Orbán’s power as he faces his rival Péter Magyar.
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Democracy Reporting International says that what it is actually trying to do is understand whether coordinated influence campaigns are running on X ahead of a consequential vote in a country where the information environment is already heavily contested.
What the ruling doesn’t resolve is what happens when X simply ignores it, as it has ignored the DSA’s access requirements so far. A court order is only as useful as the enforcement mechanism behind it.
Some background worth knowing before treating this as a straightforward transparency victory: The two organizations behind the case, DRI and Society for Civil Rights (GFF), share more than a legal strategy. Both receive funding from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, directly in GFF’s case and through DRI’s membership in the European Partnership for Democracy network.
DRI’s largest single funder is the European Commission itself, which provided €5.7 million in 2023 alone. The same institution that fined X €40 million for DSA non-compliance is also the primary financial backer of the group that just won a court order forcing X to comply with the DSA.
GFF’s funding trail has its own texture. The Mozilla Foundation granted money to GFF specifically to support “enforcement of research data access based on the DSA,” the precise legal mechanism at the center of this lawsuit.
Mozilla’s revenue comes overwhelmingly from Google, via a search engine deal. DuckDuckGo also appears on GFF’s donor list. The organizations funding DSA enforcement against X include, in other words, some of X’s most direct commercial competitors in search and browsing.
None of this proves the lawsuit is wrong on the legal merits. The DSA does demand data access, and X refused. But who funds the groups defining “election disinformation,” who decides which data requests count as legitimate research, and who benefits when X specifically (and not other platforms) faces enforcement pressure are questions that deserve at least as much scrutiny as the platform’s conduct.
