The EU had given net players until Friday to submit their number of active users per month, under the Digital Services Act (DSA) regulation. This new legislation is intended to better tackle misinformation and hate speech, and hold big platforms to account for their algorithms, which determine what users see. From the summer of 2023, it will force the biggest players in particular to be audited at their own expense by independent bodies.
The “very large” online platforms, to which the more stringent obligations apply, are those with more than 45 million active users in the EU. The European Commission will be able to impose fines of up to 6% of their worldwide turnover, or even a ban on operating in the EU, in the event of repeated serious infringements.
Most are American giants: Google Search (332 million users), YouTube (401.7 million), Facebook (255 million), Instagram (250 million), Twitter (100.9 million), Bing (107 million) . China’s TikTok revealed on Friday that it has 125 million users in the EU. Some platforms, such as Amazon, Pinterest or Apple Store, simply indicated that they were above the threshold, qualifying them as “very large platforms”, without specifying their exact number of users. Conversely Spotify, OnlyFans and Tinder ensured to be below.
“Some platforms are content to say that they are below the threshold. This is not enough. A figure is a figure”, reacted a spokesperson for the European Commission, Johannes Bahrke. “We call on platforms that have not yet done so to publish their figures quickly,” he added.
This article is originally published on cbnews.fr
