European Commission Opens Proceedings Against Facebook and Instagram Under the Digital Services Act

On April 30, 2024, the European Commission (“Commission”) announced that it has opened formal proceedings to assess whether Meta, the provider of Facebook and Instagram, is in breach of the Digital Services Act (“DSA”).

• The Commission suspects that Meta's policies and actions concerning deceptive advertising and political content on its platforms may violate regulations.
• Additionally, Meta's decision to discontinue CrowdTangle without a suitable alternative raises concerns about the absence of an effective third-party tool for real-time civil discourse and election monitoring ahead of the European Parliament (“Parliament”) elections.
• Moreover, the Commission questions the effectiveness of Meta's mechanisms for identifying illegal content ("Notice-and-Action"), as well as their systems for addressing user complaints, which may not meet the standards set by the Digital Services Act. Additionally, there are doubts about Meta's provision of access to public data for researchers.
• The available cases will focus on the following areas:

• Deceptive advertising and disinformation,
• Visibility of political content (Commission suspects that Meta's policy linked to the 'political content approach', which reduces the visibility of political content in Instagram and Facebook's recommender systems, is not in line with DSA obligations.),
• Lack of an effective third-party real-time civil discourse and election monitoring tool ahead of the upcoming Parliament elections and other elections in various Member States (Access to such tools should be expanded at election times, as set out in the Commission's recent Guidelines for providers of Very Large Online Platforms on systemic risks to electoral processes.[1])
• The mechanism to flag illegal content (The Commission also suspects that Meta has not established an effective internal complaint handling system for lodging complaints against content moderation decisions.)

• If proven, these violations would constitute breaches of Articles 14(1), 16(1), 16(5), 16(6), 17(1), 20(1), 20(3), 24(5), 25(1), 34(1), 34(2), 35(1) and 40(12) of the DSA.
• The DSA has not set any legal deadline for the termination of formal proceedings.

You can find further information here.

 

Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys-at-Law

info@zumbul.av.tr