The Digital Services Act (DSA) is our new digital constitution for Europe, strengthening the rights of citizens and curbing the power of Big Tech. For the first time, we can look under the hood of the platforms and analyse – and hopefully reduce - radicalisation and disinformation.
The storm on Capitol Hill was a wakeup call to us all. How will our democracies resist, with social media spreading hate and lies? How do we prevent genocide from being promoted on Facebook or stop teenage girls from being driven to anorexia by Instagram?
“What the European Union is achieving with the DSA is to hold platforms accountable for what they do, not for what their users think”
With the DSA, we took an important step towards saving our democracy and delivering a free internet, because censorship can never be the solution in a free country, and neither governments nor the Big Tech platforms have the right to censor legal speech. Yet speech is different from reach; what the European Union is achieving with the DSA is to hold the platforms accountable for what they do, not for what their users think.
It starts with the basics; orders by national authorities need to be respected and users need to have clear rights. Complaint mechanisms and independent dispute settlement processes, as well as transparency reports, will stop the arbitrary, almost feudal way in which the platforms currently moderate content.
We can finally open the black box that very large online platforms (VLOPs) represent, with risk assessments which will force the platforms to investigate the risks their business models and their algorithms represent for human dignity, with independent audits and with – most importantly – access to the data that will allow independent researchers and NGOs to study and assess compliance. This way, we will finally be able to shed light on the Big Tech platforms’ practices, collect evidence and tell the stories of how targeting and engagement-based ranking distorts democracy.
The DSA also sets new standards for privacy protection, as it restricts the collection of our personal data. In future, children and young people will no longer be allowed to be spied on in order to serve them advertising. Plenary also voted for protecting everybody’s sensitive data like political or religious affiliation or sexual orientation. This European development is closely followed also across the Atlantic: In the US Congress, members have just introduced a bill to ban surveillance advertising.
The DSA is not the end, but a starting point: It is the fundamental law on which we will build democratic rules for a digital world.