Countdown for Meta, TikTok, Twitter to Comply With World's Toughest Content Law
April 25 2023 - 10:00AM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner and Kim Mackrael
BRUSSELS -- The world's most far-reaching digital-content law
will oblige 19 social media, search and ecommerce services to
comply with strict new rules by late August.
Companies including Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., Meta
Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google had one or more of their
services listed Tuesday as "very large" online platforms or search
engines by the European Union's executive arm. The designations,
which also include Bytedance Ltd.'s TikTok and Twitter Inc., mean
the clock starts on a four-month countdown to get into compliance
with a slew of rules in the new law, called the Digital Services
Act.
The law is the biggest overhaul in the West's approach to online
content in more than a generation, rewiring the concept of online
responsibility as it has prevailed since the dawn of the
internet.
Under prior laws, like the U.S.'s Section 230, companies could
generally escape liability from content their users posted,
provided they took efforts to respond to certain types of
problematic content when flagged. But under the EU's new law,
companies will need to conduct regular assessments to determine all
the possible risks their systems could pose either to individual
people or pillars of civic life, such as free expression or
electoral participation--and show regulators they're addressing
them with robust systems.
The services listed on Tuesday were named in large part because
they each had declared in February that they had more than 45
million active users in the EU each month, meaning they touch at
least 10% of the bloc's population. Less stringent requirements for
services that fall below this threshold will apply next year,
enforced by national regulators in the country where a company has
its main EU headquarters.
Violators face fines of up to 6% of their global annual revenue
or 30 million euros ($33.1 million), whichever is higher. The law
includes the potential to block a platform's services in case of
certain repeated infringements.
Write to Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com and to Kim
Mackrael at kim.mackrael@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 25, 2023 09:45 ET (13:45 GMT)
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