Brussels, Jan 8 (EFE).- The European Commission on Wednesday rejected the accusation by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that the European Union (EU) has “institutionalized censorship” with “an ever-increasing number of laws,” insisting that its Digital Services Act does not force the removal of content that is legal.
“We absolutely refute any claims of censorship on our side,” European Commission chief spokesperson Paula Pinho said.
According to the European Commission Spokesperson for Tech Sovereignty, Defence, Space, and Research, Thomas Regnier, there is nothing in the Digital Services Act that forces a platform to remove legal content as “it is only required for illegal content.”
Regnier said the European Commission’s investigation into Meta for possible breaches of EU rules was going in the opposite direction, looking at whether the moderation algorithms and the platform over-criminalised political content and made it invisible to users.
The European Commission insisted that if Meta wanted to end its third-party verification program in the EU, as it has announced it will do in the US, it would have to submit a risk assessment of that decision for Brussels to assess whether it was in line with the bloc’s legislation.
Reigner said Brussels considers accredited verifiers “an effective way to mitigate systemic risks” but is open to other options as long as they are equally effective.
According to the spokesperson, there is “cooperation” between the digital giants and the European Commission, with examples such as TikTok’s removal of its rewards programme following pressure from Brussels, which considered it “toxic and addictive”.
EU sources said Meta submitted an impact assessment to Brussels on what the measure would look like if adopted in the EU, a document that the European Commission is already analyzing, with no concrete timetable for a decision on whether it complies with the bloc’s law. EFE
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