Now What: Exploring the DSA’s Enforcement Futures in Relation to Social Media Platforms and Native Advertising

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Abstract

After lengthy political debates, the Digital Services Act (DSA) has finally been agreed upon. Now, all attention is shifting towards how the European Union’s most meaningful reform in the sphere of platform governance in the past two decades will look like in practice. The question of enforcement has already been getting considerable attention, not only in academic exchanges such as the Verfassungsblog’s earlier DSA/DMA Symposium, but also in mainstream media, with the main concern being that the resources put forth by the European Commission are too humble when compared to the DSA’s far-reaching goals. Indeed, the DSA’s nature, the nature of the markets it aims to govern, as well as the plethora of stakeholders involved in platform governance make enforcement expectations more utopic than realistic.

However, the responsible digitalization of platform compliance can, at least to a certain extent, modernize and simplify market monitoring. In this short essay, I will reflect on some of the enforcement implications of the paradigm shift proposed by the DSA with respect to its framing of illegal content.

To this end, I will first discuss the definition of “illegal content” and its extension to sectoral regulation; second, I will re-visit the discussion of native advertising and highlight how it currently falls in a grey and overly complicated applicable framework in between the DSA and sectoral regulation; and lastly, I will briefly explore a potential alignment solution I developed together with Prof. Anda Iamnitchi and Thales Bertaglia and which was published and presented as a paper at the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (the full paper can be found here).
Original languageEnglish
PublisherVerfassungsblog
Media of outputOnline
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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