The European Commission initiated investigations on Tuesday (30 April) to evaluate whether Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, might have violated the Digital Services Act (DSA).
“We suspect that Meta’s moderation is insufficient,” and “lacks transparency of advertisements and content moderation procedures,” said Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager.
Facebook and Instagram were classified as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) in April 2023 under the EU’s DSA, which designates platforms with over 45 million monthly active users in the EU as VLOPs.
The platforms had to be compliant with the DSA by the end of August 2023. However, the Act entered into force on 17 February for all online intermediaries in the EU, regulating how online actors should deal with illegal and harmful content online.
Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton also mentioned the suspicion that Meta is failing to provide “real-time monitoring tools and effective mechanisms to flag illegal content” to researchers and stakeholders.
Meta has a “well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks” on its platforms and will cooperate with the Commission in the probe, a company spokesperson told Euractiv on Tuesday.
A recent report by the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox browser, emphasised this lack of data by platforms.
The Commission also unveiled a whistleblower tool on Tuesday for information regarding potential breaches of the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), another landmark act addressing competition in the digital space.
The Commission believes Meta’s handling of deceptive advertisements and disinformation may pose risks to civic discourse, electoral processes, and consumers. It is also concerned about Meta’s policy of demoting political content on Instagram and Facebook, which may violate transparency and user redress obligations.
Meta’s profits from ads are exploited by Russian manipulation actors, said a Commission official speaking at a Tuesday briefing. This not only violates DSA requirements, but also raises ethical concerns about profiting from such activities, the official said.
Meta shut down the Doppelganger campaign, a Russian disinformation campaign uncovered and named by EU DisinfoLab in collaboration with Qurium, in 2022 and has since been investigating and blocking associated assets.
The Commission also said that there is no good tool for researchers to monitor discussions and elections in real-time, especially since Meta is disbanding the social media analytics tool CrowdTangle.
Meta has said it is developing new tools to provide data for election monitoring and is transitioning users to the Meta Content Library for continued access to data.
According to the Commission, its suspicions are based on an analysis of Meta’s risk assessment report, responses to formal requests for information, public reports, and the Commission’s analysis.
The Commission will gather evidence through requests for information, interviews, or inspections. This can then lead to enforcement actions, such as interim measures, temporary actions taken during investigations to address urgent issues, and non-compliance decisions, formal rulings imposing penalties on digital service providers for failing to adhere to DSA obligations.
[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Chris Powers]
