Agreement between member states, MEPs and the European Commission has given a final green light to important and welcome European legislation to regulate the output of social media giants and provide a measure of protection to users from illegal online material. The Digital Services Act will see companies fined up to 6 per cent of global turnover for violating the rules, or banned from doing business in the EU for repeated breaches.
The new rules, which will now have to be transposed into domestic legislation, ban targeted advertising specifically aimed at children or based on sensitive data such as religion, gender, race, and political opinions. “Dark patterns”, which are tactics that mislead people into giving personal data to companies online, will also be prohibited.
The new legislation, which complements earlier EU rules tackling competition abuse by the digital giants, marks a decisive shift in their regulation and, what one newspaper called “the time of big online platforms behaving like they are ‘too big to care’ coming to an end”. It establishes the principle that content providers are not merely vehicles for others but have a responsibility for their output and must provide convincing means to moderate content and speedily take it down. Regular reports by them to regulators will have to set out and chronicle such measures’ effectiveness.
The work of transposition will be simplified by similar Irish legislation currently before the Oireachtas, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill. The Bill also provides criminal sanctions against the digital giants for failure adequately to police themselves, but which some senators (led by Malcolm Byrne and Shane Cassells) hope to toughen to make company directors personally liable with potential jail time for failures by their companies. They report that evidence to an Oireachtas committee saw "again and again, the view expressed that social media companies are not taking the question of online harm sufficiently seriously". Only criminal sanctions against individuals, they argue, will provide the incentives to force through root and branch cultural change.