A Dutch court has cleared the way for a collective damages case against X to be argued in full. On Thursday, October 22, the District Court of Amsterdam ruled that the proceedings brought by Stichting Onderzoek Marktinformatie, known as SOMI, may proceed, finding that the foundation meets all legal requirements to bring the action and appointing it the exclusive representative in the case. The case will now proceed on the merits.
SOMI filed the lawsuit on August 16, 2024, against X Corp., X Internet Unlimited Company and Twitter Netherlands B.V., the companies behind X, formerly Twitter. SOMI says it represents the interests of all Dutch X users. According to the foundation, the case concerns a number of data breaches in 2021 and 2022, unlawful microtargeting, and what it calls the massive amount of hate speech on the platform. Those are SOMI's allegations; the court has not ruled on whether they are true.
Getting to this point took more than two years. In an interim judgment on May 27, 2026, the Amsterdam court had already found that SOMI met most admissibility requirements, but it required further evidence that the foundation had sufficient financial resources to cover the costs of the proceedings and retained sufficient control over the claim. SOMI has since demonstrated both, and the court concluded that it satisfies all the requirements of Article 3:305a of the Dutch Civil Code, with SOMI to be designated exclusive representative under Article 1018c of the Code of Civil Procedure. X had challenged those arrangements, raising concerns about the funder's influence, SOMI's financial position and its certificate structure, but the challenges did not stop the case.
The court defined three groups of people the proceedings cover. The first is the data breach and inadequate security claim: everyone living in the Netherlands who used X on or after June 1, 2021, and whose personal data is in the leaked datasets named in the complaint. The second covers microtargeting and lack of transparency: Dutch residents who used X on or after August 25, 2023, and were in the target audience for ads shown as a result of what SOMI calls unauthorized microtargeting. The third concerns the Digital Services Act and systematic risks for very large online platforms, including the prevention of hate speech, and covers Dutch residents who used X on or after August 25, 2023.
On its claim page, SOMI says it wants X to stop using sensitive data for targeted advertisements, concealing data breaches and taking insufficient measures against hate speech, and it is seeking compensation for affected users. SOMI is a non-profit organization recognized by the European Commission as an organization authorized for cross-border representative actions in the European Union, and it is represented in the Netherlands by the law firm SOLV.
Next, the court will set a deadline for affected people who wish to opt out of the collective proceedings, to be announced in national daily newspapers and published in the register of collective actions. The court may also set a period for settlement negotiations with X. If no settlement is reached, the proceedings will continue, aimed at securing compensation for affected users. For X users in the Netherlands, no action is needed yet beyond watching for that opt-out notice; for everyone else, the ruling is a reminder that in Europe, a platform's data and moderation practices can be tested in a single case brought on behalf of millions of users at once.