On 17 February, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU's landmark rulebook that aims to make the online environment safer, fairer and more transparent, starts applying to all online intermediaries in the EU.
Under the DSA, EU users are better protected against illegal goods and content and have their rights upheld on online platforms where they connect with other users, share information, or buy products.
New responsibilities for platforms and empowered users
All online platforms with users in the EU, with the exception of small and micro enterprises employing fewer than 50 persons and with an annual turnover below €10 million, must implement measures to:
- Counter illegal content, goods, and services: online platforms must provide users with means to flag illegal content, including goods and services. More so, online platforms will have to cooperate with ‘trusted flaggers', specialised entities whose notices will have to be given priority by platforms.
- Protect minors: including a complete ban of targeting minors with ads based on profiling or on their personal data.
- Empower users with information about advertisements they see, such as why the ads are being shown to them and on who paid for the advertisement.
- Ban advertisements that target users based on sensitive data, such as political or religious beliefs, sexual preferences, etc.
- Provide statements of reasons to a user affected by any content moderation decision, e.g., content removal, account suspension, etc. and upload the statement of reasons to the DSA Transparency database.
- Provide users with access to a complaint mechanism to challenge content moderation decisions.
- Publish a report of their content moderation procedures at least once per year.
- Provide the user with clear terms and conditions, and include the main parameters based on which their content recommender systems work.
- Designate a point of contact for authorities, as well as users.
In addition to online platforms, the Digital Services Act also applies to hosting services (e.g. cloud services or domain name systems, background services which connect users to requested website addresses), as well as to online intermediaries (e.g. internet service providers, or domain). Hosting services and online intermediaries are subject to a subset of obligations under the DSA.
Digital Services Coordinators in Member States
Platforms not designated as VLOPs or VLOSEs will be supervised at Member State level by an independent regulator acting as the national Digital Services Coordinator (DSC). It will be the responsibility of the DSCs to ensure that these platforms play by the rules. DSCs will supervise and enforce the DSA for the platforms established on their territory.