Thierry Breton and the 16 VLOPs
The European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, has warned Twitter’s owner and CEO, Elon Musk, to be ready to comply with the Digital Services Act. This includes publishing an independent audit of how it has complied with the law.
This aspect of the Digital Services Act applies to Twitter and 16 other companies identified as being a “very large online platform” (VLOPs) – this week Breton confirmed Twitter belongs to that cohort. This should not come as a surprise: last November last Breton, implied that Twitter was in danger of non-compliance with the act, warning Musk that Twitter will have to raise its game to “pass the grade”.
Burden of proof
As such, they must all carry out annual risk assessments of the risks of harmful content including disinformation, misogyny, harms to children and election manipulation. The monitoring, moderation and other measures put in place to counteract those risks will be scrutinised by the EU.
Also, the VLOPs that minors can access will not be allowed to build profiles of the children who use the platforms which would enable advertisers to target them.
It must also be easy for any user to report illegal content, and terms and conditions must be transparent.
Since assuming control of Twitter last October, Musk has slashed headcount from 7,500 to around 1,500 which has raised concerns that the company’s ability to moderate content and address harmful content has been severely limited. One of the criterion scrutinised by the EU will be staffing levels.
Stiff penalties
The VLOPs now have four months from now comply with the Act, as have Google and Microsoft’s Bing which are classified as very large search engines (VLSEs) and have similar stringent requirements.
Failure to comply will bring stiff fines of up to 6% of annual global turnover and in extreme cases, suspension of services.