The European Commission announced on Tuesday April 30 the opening of formal proceedings against the Meta group (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) for alleged breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the regulation governing the moderation of content on social networks in Europe. “We are opening this case against Meta to ensure that effective actions are taken to prevent Instagram and Facebook vulnerabilities from being used by foreign influencers”writes, in a press release, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, citing the context of the European elections.
The announcement made Meta react: “We have a well-established process for identifying risks on our platforms and minimizing their effects, argues Mark Zuckerberg’s group. We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing even more details on our actions. »
At the heart of the Commission’s complaints: problems considered to be recurring in the way in which Meta moderates political advertisements. According to Brussels, Facebook and Instagram are experiencing a “proliferation of advertisements that pose a risk” political manipulation – or which serve as vectors for financial scams.
Facebook and Instagram advertisements have been widely used in recent months by pro-Russian disinformation operations, particularly within the framework of the so-called “Doppelgänger” or “RRN” network, whose modus operandi is to distribute false articles imitating major media, and still very active today on the Facebook advertising platform. Meta ensures that it deletes these advertisements very quickly, but cannot block them all preventively, in particular because the distributors of these advertisements use sophisticated technical tools to mask their true nature.
Transparency obligations
In addition to this main criticism, the Commission lists shortcomings in terms of transparency. The closure announced by Meta of its CrowdTangle tool, used by third parties to analyze the virality of content on Facebook, “risk of causing damage (…) by limiting the abilities of researchers and journalists to identify electoral interference operations, disinformation and misinformation”, writes the Commission. It also says it questions the compatibility of the new rules put in place by Meta, which has now decided to display less political content on its social networks in users’ news feeds, with its “transparency obligations”. According to the DSA, this type of decision must be explained and justified, the Commission implies. More marginally, Brussels believes that the tools for reporting the presence of illegal content on Facebook and Instagram could be easier to access.
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