The European Commission has opened a formal procedure against Facebook and Instagram

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “This European Commission has put in place measures to protect European citizens from targeted disinformation and manipulation by third parties. If we suspect that the rules have been broken, we take action. This applies at all times, but is especially relevant during democratic elections. Large digital platforms have a duty to commit sufficient resources to this end, and our decision today shows that we take compliance seriously. Protecting democracy is a struggle that we carry out together with the member states. Today in Prague, I want to thank Prime Minister Mr. Fiala for his active role in raising this issue at the European level, as well as for the fact that Belgium has started to apply the mechanism for the urgent exchange of information between member states.”

The alleged violations include Meta’s policies and practices regarding misleading advertising and political content on its services. They also relate to the lack of effective third-party real-time civic discourse and election monitoring in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, as Meta abandoned its real-time public insights tool, CrowdTangle, and did not replace it with any suitable alternative.

In addition, the European Commission suspects that the service’s flagging mechanism for illegal content (“Notice and Action”), as well as user redress and internal complaints mechanisms, do not comply with the requirements of the Digital Services Act and that there are deficiencies in the access provided by Meta to researchers. to publicly available data. The procedure was started based on the preliminary 2023 September. analysis of the risk assessment report sent by Meta, Meta’s responses to the European Commission’s official requests for information (on illegal content and disinformation, data access, ad-free subscription and generative artificial intelligence), publicly available reports and the European Commission’s own analysis .

If these violations were proven, it would mean that Article 14, Paragraph 1, Article 16, Paragraphs 1, 5 and 6, Article 17, Paragraph 1, Article 20, Paragraphs 1 and 3, Article 24, Paragraph 5, Article 25, Paragraph 1 of the Digital Services Act have been violated. , paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article 34, paragraph 1 of Article 35 and paragraph 12 of Article 40. The European Commission will now carry out a detailed investigation as a matter of priority. The initiation of a formal procedure does not affect its outcome.

The European Commission, having officially opened the procedure, will continue to collect evidence, for example by sending additional requests for information, conducting interviews or inspections.

Information of the EC representation in Lithuania

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