EC Probes Adequacy of Meta's Protection of Minors Under the DSA

Meta may be violating the Digital Services Act by failing to protect minors on Instagram and Facebook, according to the European Commission. During a briefing Thursday EC officials cited four concerns about the adequacy of Meta's risk assessment for underage users and mitigation measures addressing problems: its algorithms may exploit the weakness of younger users and cause addictive behavior; (2) ineffective measures to prevent algorithms from feeding users material of a certain type that leads them down a "rabbit hole" of inappropriate content; (3) lack of effective age-verification tools; and (4) security and privacy protections not aligning with the DSA. Meta wants "young people to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online" and has "spent a decade developing more than 50 tools and policies designed to protect them," a spokesperson wrote in an email. "This is a challenge the whole industry is facing." These Meta cases are the third and fourth dealing with protection of minors launched under the DSA, EC officials noted; the first two, filed in April, involve TikTok (see 2404220024). Additionally, two pending cases against Instagram and Facebook, also filed in April, are based on concerns about deceptive advertising and political content (see 2404300001). Officials said they're also closely monitoring X, checking that it's sufficiently mitigating against disinformation campaigns. In addition, the EC is in close contact with X about the launch of its AI tool Grok, noting that the company announced Thursday it's delaying the launch until after EU elections in June. The postponement indicates the company is paying attention to the DSA, and that the legislation is having a huge impact on the market, EC officials said. Meanwhile, the European Consumers Organisation (BEUC) filed a complaint with the EC accusing Chinese online marketplace Temu of flouting the DSA by failing to protect consumers. Among other things, BEUC said, Temu doesn't provide sufficient traceability of traders selling on the platform, and it uses manipulation such as dark patterns in recommending products.