On Thursday 9 January, five members of the German SPD party - including four MEPs - issued recommendations to strengthen democratic processes in the European Union in the face of the risks that could arise from the manipulation of online social networks, while on the same day, the owner of the digital platform X, US entrepreneur Elon Musk, hosted a livestream chat on X with the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party, Alice Weidel, to promote her candidacy for the German parliamentary elections to be held on 23 February (see EUROPE 13551/8).
Accusing CEOs of the Meta and X platforms of a “historic break” with the principles of the Rule of law, MEPs René Repasi, Tiemo Wölken, Birgit Sippel, Matthias Ecke and Bundestag member Jens Zimmermann have written an open letter calling for Zuckerberg and Musk to be “summoned immediately” to the European Parliament, as well as “a ban on access by Meta lobbyists to all EU institutions (...), with the exception of consultations required as part of ongoing investigations against the company”.
In May 2018, Mr Zuckerberg had been summoned to explain to the European Parliament about the use of personal data collected on the Facebook social network by ‘Cambridge Analytica’ for electoral purposes (see EUROPE 12024/9).
The five elected members are calling for “a swift conclusion to the investigations underway under the Digital Services Act against the X and Tiktok platforms, as well as an examination and, where appropriate, the opening of proceedings against the Meta/Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms, with a particular focus on the design of recommendation algorithms”. In their view, if the companies concerned fail to cooperate, their “temporary ban” in the EU should not be ruled out as a measure of last resort.
To help the Commission make progress with its investigations, the five elected members state that its teams responsible for monitoring compliance with EU law should be strengthened. It currently has a staff of 150, around 30 of whom work at the ‘European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency’ based in Seville. In addition, they consider it necessary, in the interests of independence from political power, to transfer this supervisory responsibility to “a separate administrative structure”.
‘Euro Stack Act’. According to the Social Democrats, “the rapid entanglement of business interests with the authoritarian agenda of the incoming Trump presidency must be a wake-up call for Europe” in terms of strategic independence, given that US companies “not only control almost all relevant social media in Europe”, but also “a significant share of strategically important technologies, from cloud infrastructure and software applications to smartphones”.
This is why the five elected members are advocating the launch of the ‘Euro Stack Act’ initiative to strengthen Europe’s technological capabilities and reduce the risk of the EU being exposed to “blackmail through technological dependencies”. This initiative would make it possible to assess the extent of such dependence, analyse the obstacles to the development of European capacities, mobilise “significant European public and private funding”, and create a facilitated legal framework for companies in the sector along the lines of the Chips Act.
To see the statement by the German Social Democrats (in German): https://aeur.eu/f/ezj
The S&D and Renew Europe groups in the European Parliament have announced their intention to hold a debate on Mr Musk’s political activism under EU rules at the next plenary session in Strasbourg.
Meta. On Tuesday, Meta sent the European Commission two preliminary analyses of the systemic risks of the announced change to its internal rules. The first concerns the replacement of the ‘fact-checking’ programme in the United States by a mechanism based on ‘community ratings’ (see EUROPE 13553/5) and the other concerns its policy in the EU on combating hate speech.
The Commission is currently analysing these studies. In the first case, one of the questions raised is the risk that content whose veracity is no longer checked in the United States will remain accessible in the EU.
If Meta announces the end of its ‘fact-checking’ programme for the EU as well, the company will have to provide a new preliminary risk analysis demonstrating that the new system is as effective as its ‘fact-checking’ one. For the Commission, however, Mr Zuckerberg’s statements about the US market are a worrying sign.
On Wednesday evening, the French authorities expressed their “concern” about Meta’s decision. In a statement, they vow to ensure that the very large digital platforms comply with their obligations under the DSA, which, by holding platforms “responsible for the content” published, protects citizens “from foreign interference and manipulation of information”. And they added: “Freedom of expression, a fundamental right protected in France and Europe, should not be confused with a right to virality, which would permit the dissemination of inauthentic content to millions of users without any filtering or moderation”. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)