The European Commission issued, on Wednesday 18 October, a series of recommendations calling on the Member States to fast-track the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 13262/9) in order to curb the dissemination of illegal content online. The volume of this type of content, already very present on certain platforms, has increased sharply since the start of the Hamas attack on Israel and the latter’s response.
In particular, the Commission is asking the Member States to designate “as of now” an independent authority to form the future network of digital services coordinators. The deadline for designating this authority under the DSA is 17 February 2024.
In addition, the Commission is proposing an incident response mechanism describing the cooperation between the Commission and the future network of coordinators. The proposed mechanism would include “regular incident response meetings” to exchange best practices and report on different national situations.
The Commission then intends to rely on the information gathered from the network of coordinators to exercise its supervisory powers, in accordance with the provisions of the DSA.
In addition, the Commission is encouraging major online platforms, in the event of “extraordinary circumstances” such as international armed conflict or terrorist attacks, to “draw up incident protocols relevant to the specific incident”.
This series of recommendations comes as the Internal Market Commissioner, Thierry Breton, sent several letters last week to X (formerly Twitter), Meta (see EUROPE 13269/8), TikTok (see EUROPE 13270/7), Google and YouTube (see EUROPE 13271/14) asking them to respond to the measures implemented to put an end to the dissemination of illegal content and disinformation on their platforms.
Following these letters, the Commission opened an initial investigation on 13 October against social network X under the DSA (see EUROPE 13271/13).
To see the recommendations: https://aeur.eu/f/94t (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)