The European Commission announced this Monday a formal procedure against X (formerly Twitter) for the alleged distribution of illegal content related to the conflict in the Middle East, to prove violations of the new Digital Services Act.
“The European Commission has initiated a formal procedure to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act in the areas of risk management, content moderation, hidden patterns, advertising transparency and researcher access data,” Brussels said in a statement published this year. Monday.
Based on the preliminary investigation and data mentioned in the X reports, the community leader decided to “initiate a formal violation procedure” to investigate, among other things, “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.”
As the new Digital Services Act obliges platforms to act on this type of illegal content by moderating content and combating manipulation, the agency will now carry out an “in-depth investigation as a priority” of the measures taken.
In particular, Brussels will collect additional evidence and information and, if errors are proven, may impose sanctions on X.
Companies that do not comply with this new legislation may face fines proportional to their size, with larger companies subject to penalties of up to 6% of their global turnover.
With 112 million monthly active users in the EU, X is the first target of formal proceedings under the new legislation.
Since late August last year and after an adjustment period, the EU has become the first jurisdiction in the world to have rules for digital platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, which will now be required to remove illegal content.
These obligations stem from the entry into force this Monday of the EU Digital Services Act, under which the Commission has identified 19 very large online platforms with 45 million monthly active users that will have to comply with the new rules. , including AliExpress, Amazon, Apple AppStore, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and Zalando.
They add two very large search engines such as Bing and the Google search tool.
The new Digital Services Act was created to protect the fundamental rights of online users and is an unprecedented law in the digital space that holds platforms accountable for illegal and harmful content, namely misinformation.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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