The European Commission has activated a contradictory investigation of Meta’s social networks, Facebook and Instagram, because according to the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, it is not convinced “that Meta has done enough to fulfill the obligations of the Digital Services law (DSA): mitigate the risks of negative effects for the physical and mental health of young Europeans on their platforms”. In reality, Brussels does have a conviction: Meta encourages the addiction of minors to the networks.
Breton was the first to announce the opening of this procedure, which is provided for in European legislation, through a tweet to X, and did not offer any further details. Later, the Community Vice President of Competition, Margrethe Vestager, explained that the concern is that these networks “can encourage addictive behavior and that the age verification methods that Meta has implemented in its services are not adequate”.
There are two articles for which Facebook and Instagram are being investigated. The first is 35, on risk mitigation. The law states that these large platforms “must establish reasonable, proportionate and effective mitigation measures, adapted to the specific systemic risks identified” in a previous article.
The list of risks is very extensive and includes the dissemination of illegal content, although it seems that the Commission’s investigation will focus mainly on the real or foreseeable negative effects on the rights of the child”, although it focuses on minors.
The other article of the digital services law that Breton exposes as the basis of the investigation into Facebook and Meta is article 28, which preserves the online protection of minors. The regulation orders that social networks that are available to minors “must establish adequate and proportionate measures to guarantee a high level of privacy, security and protection of minors in their service”. The text explicitly states that platforms accessed by children “cannot present advertisements on their interface based on profiling” based on the use of “personal data of the recipient of the service when they know with reasonable certainty that the recipient of the service is a minor”.
The DSA, which came into full effect in February, foresees fines for breach of a single obligation of a maximum of 6% of the annual business volume of the previous fiscal year. Facebook’s global turnover in 2023 was $134.902 billion. Therefore, a penalty for this concept would be 8,094 million dollars, about 7,444 million euros.
The DSA also includes a maximum penalty of 1% of annual worldwide revenue for providing incorrect, incomplete or misleading information, in addition to coercive fines of up to 5% of average daily turnover.”
A spokesperson for Meta expressed after the announcement its readiness to collaborate with the European authorities. “We want young people to have safe and age-appropriate online experiences, and for a decade we’ve been developing more than 50 tools and policies to protect them. This is a challenge faced by the entire industry and we wish to share the details of our work with the European Commission”, he said.
