Landmark Bill Targets Social Media and Big Tech's Misinformation Spreading

European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager during an interview with Reuters in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: Johanna Geron/Reuters

The European Union reached an agreement on Saturday to push a new legislation to force global tech companies to tackle the misinformation problem on their social media platform products. The law, the Digital Service Act, will require companies to not only actively combat the misinformation threat, but also be transparent about the harm of divisive content and stop targeting certain advertisements for ethnicity, religion, or secual orientation. 

The Digital Service Act is part of the one-two punch from the European Union to address the societal harm and socioeconomics effects of big tech companies and their products. A month before the 16 hours deliberation that produced the Digital Service Act earlier on Saturday, the EU agreed to another sweeping law, the Digital Market Act. The Digital Market Act is aimed to prevent tech giants from conducting anti-competitive market behaviors deemed by regulators in any state of the 27 countries bloc. The Digital Service Act, on the other hand, addresses the societal harms of misinformation and illicit content on social media by providing credible deterrence. 

The last part of the new law is still yet to be disclosed and the act is required to go through another voting before it can officially go into effect next year. However, the legislator hopes the mechanic of this sweeping law can compel tech companies to police their influential platform proactively. 

Under the risk of billion dollars in fine, the tech giants are incentivized to disclose the amplification of certain contents on their products and to set up procedure to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist prograganda, or any illegal material according to the country where the consumer is using the digital platform service. For the definition of "illegal material," the law leaves the definition to be decided by the legislative branch of every country. For example, hate speech and reference of Nazism are illegal in Germany, while it may not necessarily be so in other European countries as of now.

The law is a stand-out legal attempt to address societal harm of online speech and it is especially a huge contrast to the lack of legislative actions in the United States. In the United States, online speech has mostly been off-limit due to the protection provided by the First Amendment. As a result, any relevant and effective acts will have difficulties to form. While the US regulator has filed lawsuits against the same tech giants the Digital Service Act is targeting, the attempts are fruitless. For example, there are no comprehensive federal laws to combat the tech giants' power in the antitrust cases against Google and Meta, which lead to the inevitable failed attempts to tackle misinformation on their products.

The Justice Department of the United States accused Google of building an illegal monopoly over fundamental parts of the internet. Photo: Joe Buglewicz/New York Times

However, the act still raises the question of effective enforcement. The General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R, is an example that sometimes even the world's toughest regulator may appear to enforce laws tougher on paper than in reality. After G.D.P.R took effect in 2018, there has been little action against the major data collection practices from companies such as Google and Facebook. Most tech giants avoided the punishments by over-burdening users with tedious consent agreements that consumers tend to agree to within a second. 

Agustín Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the European Consumer Organization, believes that "Effective enforcement is absolutely key to the success of these new rules." He thinks that there needs to be effective enforcement in the future for the success of the new act, which can be more consequential than just affecting the EU's digital platform users. This is because other countries– including the aforementioned United States– are also watching the attempt to address social media's societal harms. 

Alexandra Geese, a Green party member of the European Parliament from Germany, agreed. She said that “This will be a model" for Japan, India, and other countries across the globe, to use to learn what the legislative branch can do to tackle this modern information warfare.