Meta has come up with some of the new steps it intends to take on measures related to compliance with the new EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which is a bid to expand control and transparency measures for social media users in Europe.

The DSA will increase capacity for social media users to control their online experience, and the usage of personal data would increase. Also, greater competition will be facilitated in the sector by providing an outlook on the operating processes of large platforms.

As well as this, Meta will soon let users in the EU access an algorithm-free experience in its apps and is also expanding more information for researchers, both to its Ad Library and within academic insight tools.

The central user update here is removal of algorithms-a move that will be welcomed by many.

Meta says:

We're now giving our European community the ability to view and discover content on Reels, Stories, Search and other parts of Facebook and Instagram that isn't ranked by Meta using [algorithmic] systems. For instance, on Facebook and Instagram, customers will be able to view Stories and Reels from only people they follow, in chronological order, from newest to oldest.". They will also get to see the Search results based just on the words they enter, rather than being personalized specifically to them, based on their previous activity and personal interests.

That will probably please the ears of many social media users, who consider algorithmic ranking to be, in practice, interference, and a way to make you look at something in every app. Many Facebook and Instagram users have been criticizing the algorithmic sorting for years, though when an option to turn off the algorithm has appeared, it was not quite so popular or useful as most waited for.

Which, no doubt, will happen here as well. Even though the whole concept of this chronologically delivered content is pretty irresistible, the fact is that such an implementation by algorithms from these platforms does work and better user experience.

In short, you'll probably use Facebook or Instagram less often without the algorithmic filter, but users from the EU will be able to turn it back on if they want to under the new regulation.
TikTok has announced it, too, will offer the algorithmic sorting option as optional to EU users.
Another front where Meta is expanding its Ads Library which will soon boast of displaying and archiving all ads targeting people in the EU, including information about the dates when each ad ran, specific targeting parameters used (like age, gender, location), who was targeted by each ad, and much more.

It would thus be highly useful to research practitioners looking for deeper insight into what campaigns targeted various audiences in order to best bring misuse to light. It would also prove useful for ad managers to optimize their approach with more insight into exactly how competitor brands are looking to reach specific audiences in each app.

Meta will also provide new dedicated tools for researchers, to make public posts better searchable in each app. That is a key part of an expanded transparency push that will provide more functional insight into how Meta's systems work and the relative influence through public posts.

Meta claims that it brought together one of the biggest cross-functional teams in the company's history to create its DSA compliance strategy, setting over 1,000 employees to work on new solutions following the update.

Another thing worth noting is that the reason why the DSA is keeping Threads from being accessible at the moment to the users in the EU is simply because the team of Threads was swift in implementing core functional options for the app, yet they hadn't gone the length of expanding to ensure the appeasement of the requirements implemented under DSA at that moment.

This will have a wide ripple effect; it will be interesting to see how DSA changes the experience for EU users and if that then inspires an expansion of similar regulations in other areas.