European Commission opens formal proceedings against Facebook and Instagram under the Digital Services Act

The European Commission has opened formal proceedings to assess whether Meta, the provider of Facebook and Instagram, may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA). The suspected infringements cover Meta's policies and practices relating to deceptive advertising and political content on its services. They also concern the non-availability of an effective third-party real-time civic discourse and election-monitoring tool ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, against the background of Meta's deprecation of its real-time public insights tool CrowdTangle without an adequate replacement. Further, the Commission suspects that the mechanism for flagging illegal content on the services as well as the user redress and internal complaint-mechanisms are not compliant with the requirements of the Digital Services Act and that there are shortcomings in Meta's provision of access to publicly available data to researchers. The opening of proceedings is based on a preliminary analysis of the risk assessment report sent by Meta in September 2023.