The European Union said Tuesday that it suspects Meta’s social networking platforms, Facebook and Instagram, of violating the bloc’s rules for larger platforms regarding election integrity.
The Commission has opened formal infringement proceedings to investigate Meta under the Digital Services Act (DSA), an online governance and content moderation framework. As a reminder, penalties for confirmed violations of the regulation may include fines of up to 6% of annual global turnover.
The EU’s concerns here span several areas: Meta’s moderation of political advertising – which it says is inadequate; Meta’s policies on moderating unpaid political content, which the EU believes are opaque and overly restrictive, while the DSA requires platforms’ policies to ensure transparency and accountability; and Meta’s policies related to allowing outsiders to monitor elections.
The EU’s crackdown also targets Meta’s procedures, which allow users to flag illegal content, which they say is not user-friendly enough. and its internal complaint handling system for content moderation decisions, which it also suspects is ineffective.
“If Meta is paid to display advertisements, it does not appear that they have an effective content moderation mechanism in place,” said a commission official, who briefed journalists on the background of the factors that led them to the initiated the bundle of investigations. “Including for advertising that could be generated by generative AI – such as deep fakes – and which have been, or appear to have been, exploited by malicious actors for foreign interference.”
The EU is relying on some independent research, itself enabled by another DSA requirement that major platforms publish a searchable ad archive. In their view, this showed that Meta’s ad platform is being exploited by Russian influence campaigns targeting elections through paid ads. It also said it had found evidence of a lack of effective ad moderation, with Meta generally being exploited by fraudsters – with the commission pointing to a rise in financial fraud ads on the platform.
Regarding organic (unpaid) political content, the EU said Meta appears to limit the visibility of political content to users by default, but does not appear to provide sufficient explanation – neither of how content is identified as political, nor of how moderation is carried out. The commission also said it found evidence that suggests Meta shadow-bans (limits visibility/reach) certain accounts with a high volume of political posts.
If confirmed, such measures would constitute a violation of the DSA, as the regulation imposes a legal obligation on platforms to transparently communicate the policies they apply to their users.
With regard to election monitoring, the EU is particularly concerned about Meta’s recent decision to block access to CrowdTangle, a tool that researchers were previously able to use for real-time election monitoring.
No investigation has been launched into this, but an urgent formal request for information (RFI) has been sent to Meta regarding its decision to scrap the research tool – and the company has been given five days to respond. Commission officials briefed journalists on the development and suggested that, depending on Meta’s response, they could take further action in this area, such as opening a formal investigation.
The short response time clearly conveys a sense of urgency. Last year, shortly after the EU picked up the baton for monitoring larger platforms’ DSA compliance with some of the transparency and risk mitigation rules, the Commission named election integrity as one of its priority areas for enforcing the regulation.
During today’s briefing, Commission officials pointed to the upcoming European elections in June and questioned the timing of Meta’s decision to reject CrowdTangle. “Our concern – and that is why we consider this a particularly urgent issue – is that just a few weeks before the European elections, Meta decided to abolish this tool that has enabled journalists, civil society actors and researchers, for example the US 2020 Elections to Monitor Election-Related Risks.”
The Commission is concerned that another tool that Meta has claimed will replace CrowdTangle does not have equivalent/superior capabilities. In particular, the EU fears that it will not allow outsiders to monitor election risks in real time. Officials also expressed concerns about the slow rollout of Meta’s new tool.
“At this time, we are requesting information from Meta on how they plan to address the lack of a real-time election monitoring tool,” a senior commission official said during the briefing. “We are also requesting some additional documentation from them regarding the decision that led to deprecating Crowdtangle and their assessment of the capabilities of the new tool.”
Meta has been contacted for comment on the Commission’s actions. In a statement, a company spokesperson said: “We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms. “We look forward to continuing our work with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.”
These are the first formal DSA investigations Meta has faced – but not the first RFIs. Last year, the EU sent a flood of requests for information to Meta – relating to, among other things, the Israel-Hamas war, election security and child safety.
Given the volume of requests for information on meta-platforms, the company could face further DSA investigations as the Commission’s enforcement authorities process multiple submissions.