ARTICLES / ANALYSIS

    Carl Vander Maelen (Ghent University, Faculty of Law and Criminology) and Rachel Griffin (Sciences Po Law School) The chronicle of a retreat foretold has come to pass. Following months of rumours about Twitter’s willingness or capacities to comply with EU tech regulation after its new owner Elon Musk fired most of the company’s […]

by Natali Helberger,* Max van Drunen, Ronan Fahy, Laurens Naudts, Stanislaw Piasecki, Theresa Seipp (all University of Amsterdam, Institute for Information Law (IViR)) In December last year, Twitter suspended without notification the accounts of several leading journalists for alleged violations of the terms of service through their reporting. The move was widely criticised by journalists, […]

In this blogpost, Julian Jaursch explains why Digital Services Coordinators should establish strong research and data units. To detect and mitigate infringements of the Digital Services Act (DSA), member states’ Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs) need a deep understanding of how platforms work and what potential risks are associated with them. Considering also that the DSA contains a multitude of reports and databases to monitor and analyze, member states should equip their DSCs with research and data units that can develop knowledge on platform risks, conduct data analyses, participate in expert communities and support EU-level enforcement efforts.

In this blog post, Doris Buijs and Ilaria Buri look into the two crisis provisions in the DSA based on which platforms must adopt certain crisis mitigation measures. What do they entail and what can be expected of those provisions in times of multiple and systemic crises?

DSA Observatory – IViR’s researchers João Pedro Quintais, Naomi Appelman and Ronan Fahy published a new article “Using Terms and Conditions to Apply Fundamental Rights to Content Moderation” (forthcoming in German Law Journal). In this article, they critically explore questions around the enforceability of fundamental rights via T&Cs through the prism of Article 14 DSA. […]

The European Commission has clarified its focus for implementing the DSA. The Commission will first work on implementing procedural regulation and delivering delegated acts on the supervisory fees and independent external audits. Four other implementing and delegated acts and five guidance documents will take a lower priority. Pim ten Thije provides a handy overview of the focus areas and other acts and guidelines to come.

The Digital Services Act designates VLOPs and VLOSEs based on their number of ‘average monthly active recipients’. How can and should online platforms calculate their number of ‘AMARs’? What role will embedded content and auto-completed search results play? And will the discounting of bots, scrapers and ‘double’ visitors lead to extra tracking of platforms’ recipients? This blog dives deep into the concept of average monthly active recipients.

This blog post looks into the implications of the DSA on the media, in specific: protection of journalistic and media content under the DSA. What (procedural) rights can be used by journalists to protect their content online? And what are the platforms’ obligations to protect media freedom and freedom of expression?

Prof. Natali Helberger published a blog post on the Media@LSE blog titled: How Council of Europe guidelines on managing the impact of digital technologies on freedom of expression complement the DSA. Read on for a short introduction and more.

Prof. Natali Helberger, a contributor to the DSA Observatory and Prof. Wolfgang Schulz of the Hans-Bredow Institute, Hamburg published a blog post on the Media@LSE blog titled: Understandable, but still wrong: How freedom of communication suffers in the zeal for sanctions. The authors discuss the ban of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik by the Council […]

DSA Observatory’s Joris van Hoboken wrote a new essay for the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), “European Lessons in Self-Experimentation: From the GDPR to European Platform Regulation”. The essay is part of The Four Domains of Global Platform Governance, an essay series that examines platform governance from four distinct policy angles: content, data, competition […]

Bengi Zeybek, Joris van Hoboken and Ilaria Buri (Institute for Information Law, IViR – University of Amsterdam)   Introduction  Platforms’ content moderation decisions affect individual users and society at large in various ways. Content may be unduly removed or accounts may be suspended arbitrarily; politicians and influencers may be deplatformed, or artists may be shadowbanned. […]

Report on the DSA Observatory & IViR expert roundtable of 18 March 2022 Ilaria Buri, Isabel Lereno Monteiro Guedes and Lucas Balluff   In reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on March 1st 2022, the Council of the EU passed a series of measures targeting the dissemination of Russian media outlets Russia Today (RT) […]

Melinda Rucz (Institute for Information Law, IViR – University of Amsterdam) The position of Hungary on the DSA Proposal It appears from the comments sent by the Hungarian government to the Digital Services Act (DSA) proposal that a central concern for Hungary is the potentially disproportionate effect of content moderation efforts on free online expression. […]

Ilaria Buri (Institute for Information Law, IViR, University of Amsterdam) On 14 December 2021, the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) Committee of the European Parliament adopted its final report on the Digital Services Act (DSA) proposal. The report – together with new additional amendments proposed over the past weeks – will be voted upon […]

Ilaria Buri and Joris van Hoboken   On last 25 November, the Council (Competitiveness) meeting approved its negotiating position (general approach text) on the DSA. Far from turning the Commission’s proposal upside down, the Council’s amendments clarify and expand certain (limited) aspects of the proposal, but do not fundamentally alter the content and structure of […]

Ilaria Buri (Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam) The French position on the DSA proposal It shouldn’t come as a surprise that France is playing a very active and central role in the current discussions on the DSA package. Not only is the DSA one of the defining proposals of this EU legislature, but […]

By Britt van den Branden, Sophie Davidse and Eva Smit* This blog is the third and final part. See blog 1 here and blog 2 here. After analysing the Community Guidelines and Terms of Use (hereafter: CG and ToU) of six platforms in the first blogpost and applying them to case studies in the second […]

Lidia Dutkiewicz, Jan Czarnocki (Center for IT and IP law – CiTiP, KU Leuven) The position of Poland on the DSA proposal The Polish government’s proposals for amendment of the DSA proposal have been relatively significant. In its position published on 14 April 2021, the Polish government points out to the following key recommendations which […]

Joris van Hoboken (Institute for Information Law, IViR – University of Amsterdam) The position of the Netherlands on the DSA proposal The Netherlands supports the revision of the ECD framework and the main policy objectives and overall choices made by the European Commission in the proposal for the DSA. It attaches weight to the economic […]

Bengi Zeybek*   Introduction Given the size of platforms, the scale at which they operate, and the immense amount of user content created and shared online, automated tools are an integral part of platforms’ content moderation and curation processes. Platforms use automated tools to identify and analyse content in order to enforce their terms of […]

In September 2021, the Verfassungsblog and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition co-hosted an online symposium, “To Break Up or Regulate Big Tech? Avenues to Constrain Private Power in the DSA/DMA Package”. “The concentration of private power in the digital realm is not tenable – on this there is consensus. It extends across […]

By Britt van den Branden, Sophie Davidse and Eva Smit*   This blog is part two of three. See part 1 here. Part 3 will follow soon. In part one of this blog series, we showed that the Community Guidelines and Terms of Use (hereafter: CG and ToU) of six well known very large online […]

Joan Barata This blog post synthesises the main arguments and conclusions developed in a report commissioned to the author by the Plataforma en Defensa de la Libertad de Información (PDLI), fully available here.   Introduction The UN Human Rights Council declared in its resolution 32/13 of 1 July 2016 that “(…) the same rights that […]

AWO data rights agency put together an overview of all the proposals related to online advertising in the DSA, DMA and other legislation. The overview is an invaluable source to follow the latest developments on the discussion concerning the regulation of online advertising and ad-funded business models, currently taking place in Europe and the US. […]