The European Union said on Tuesday that it suspects Meta's social networking platforms, Facebook and Instagram, of breaking the bloc's rules for larger platforms in relation to election integrity.

The European Commission has initiated formal infringement procedures against Meta under the Digital Services Act, an online governance and content moderation framework. For breaches that have been found to be valid, penalties include fines of up to 6% of a company's worldwide annual turnover.

The concerns of the EU are diversified. To start with is the moderation of political advertisements, where the EC suspects may not be sufficient. Then policies that Meta had for moderation of non-paid political content scared the EU since they appear ambiguous and overly stringent as compared to DSA requirements where the policy of the platform has to present transparency and accountability. Last, the Commission is evaluating policies Meta has in relation to providing tools for third parties in the monitoring of elections.

This second series of charges also strikes at Meta's reporting mechanisms for illicit content allowed through its system, something that the EC feels it does not have a friendly face to the users. It is also the in-house complaint mechanism for content moderation decisions, which the Commission is skeptical of the system and deems ineffective.

"When Meta gets paid for displaying advertising, it doesn't appear that they have put in place effective mechanism of content moderation," said a Commission official briefing journalists on background on the factors that led the EC to open the bundle of investigations. Including for advertisements that could be generated by a generative AI-for example, deep fakes-and these have been exploited or appear to have been exploited by malicious actors for foreign interference.

The EU is relying on some independent research by AI Forensics made possible by another DSA requirement that large platforms publish a searchable ad archive, which, the EC suggests, has shown Meta's ad platform being exploited by Russian influence campaigns targeting elections via paid ads. The Commission has also mentioned that it had found proof of the inefficiency of ad moderation on the part of Meta. It said that generally, scammers exploit Meta, then pointed to a surge of financial scam ads on the platform.

On organic (non-paid) political content, the EU said Meta appears to default users to limited visibility of political content but does not seem to provide sufficient explanation as to how it identifies the content as political, nor how moderation is done. The Commission also said that it had found evidence suggesting that Meta is shadowbanning, or limiting the reach and visibility of, accounts that have high volumes of political posting.

Should it be so, then, that decision would be a violation against the DSA because a legal requirement the regulations confer on such platforms is an obligation that they clearly make their applicable policies known to its users with transparency.

As far as CrowdTangle is concerned: Election tracking and monitoring- EU takes more concern from recent decisions regarding the shuttering of Meta by restricting access for using real-time election research by relying on CrowdTangle.

So far, the EC has not opened an investigation on this matter but has issued an RFI to Meta on the deprecation of the research tool, warning that it is giving Meta five days to respond formally. Briefing journalists on the development, Commission officials hinted they may take further action in this area-possibly including the opening of a formal investigation-if Meta's response was not deemed satisfactory.

Clearly, there is an urgency with this short deadline. Just last year, the EU just started monitoring larger platforms for compliance with a portion of the DSA transparency and risk mitigation rules when the Commission designated election integrity as one of the areas for the regulation's enforcement.

During the day's briefing today, members of the Commission claimed that CrowdTangle was deprecation in bad time since elections are happening this June in Europe. Our concern — and also the reason why we look at this as a peculiarly urgent issue — is that just a few weeks ahead of the European election, Meta has decided to depreciate this tool, which enabled journalists … civil society actors and researchers in, for instance, the 2020 U.S. elections, to monitor election-related risks.

The Commission is concerned that another tool Meta has said will replace CrowdTangle does not have equivalent/superior capabilities. The EU is particularly concerned that the tool will not let outsiders monitor election risks in real-time. Officials also raised concerns about slow onboarding for Meta's new tool.

At this point, we're asking Meta as to how they will resolve that deficit without the real-time election monitoring tool, "added a senior Commission official briefing for the press corps. We are also asking them for a couple of additional documents concerning that decision that has taken them to deprecate CrowdTangle and assessment concerning their new tool.

The company spokesperson said in the statement, "We have an established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms. We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work."

These are the first formal DSA investigations Meta has faced, but not the first RFIs. Last year, the EU sent Meta a flurry of requests for information, including in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, election security and child safety, among others.
 
In light of the variety of information requests on Meta platforms, the company could face additional DSA investigations as Commission enforcers work through multiple submissions.