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The European Commission has launched formal proceedings to assess whether Facebook and Instagram provider Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act, the European law that protects against targeted disinformation and manipulation by third countries. The alleged violations concern Meta’s policies and practices regarding false advertising and political content on its services. They also concern the unavailability of an effective third-party real-time civic monitoring and election monitoring tool ahead of the European Parliament elections, in the context of Meta’s deprecation of its real-time public analytics tool CrowdTangle without a adequate replacement. Furthermore, the Commission suspects that the mechanism for reporting illegal content on the services (Notice-and-Action) as well as the user redress and internal complaint mechanisms «are not compliant with the requirements of the Digital Services Law and that there are deficiencies in supply by Meta”.
How the procedure works
The procedure opened – explains Palazzo Berlaymont – by the European Commission will focus on three areas:
Misleading advertising and disinformation: The Commission suspects that Meta does not comply with DSA obligations relating to the dissemination of misleading advertising, disinformation campaigns and inauthentic behavior coordinated in the EU. The proliferation of such content may pose a risk to civic discourse, electoral processes and fundamental rights, as well as consumer protection;
Visibility of political content: The Commission suspects that Meta’s “political content approach” strategy, which downgrades political content in Instagram and Facebook’s recommendation systems, including their feeds, does not comply with DSA obligations. The investigation will focus on the compatibility of this policy with user transparency and redress obligations, as well as with risk assessment and mitigation requirements for civic discourse and electoral processes;
The unavailability of an effective third-party tool for real-time monitoring of civic discourse and elections in view of the upcoming European Parliament elections and other elections in various Member States. Meta is in the process of depreciating “CrowdTangle,” a public insights tool that enables real-time election monitoring by researchers, journalists and civil society. even through visual dashboards, without adequate replacement; – The mechanism for reporting illegal content. The Commission suspects that the mechanism, which allows users to report the presence of Meta content, does not comply with the obligations of the DSA. The EU now expects Meta to respond to the Commission’s findings “within five working days”. The initiation of a formal procedure authorizes the Commission to adopt further enforcement measures, such as provisional measures and decisions of non-compliance. The Commission also has the power to accept commitments made by Meta to remedy the issues raised in the proceedings.