The harm inflicted on democracy by big tech and their social media platforms becomes clearer by the day.
The most ambitious attempt to rein it in so far is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA): the “first comprehensive declaration of a digital future founded on the legitimate authority of democratic rights and the rule of law”, according to the author and Professor Shoshana Zuboff.
In February 2024, the DSA came fully into force across all EU member states. Since then, Civitates’ strategic decision to focus on the law’s implementation at national level has started to pay dividends.
Turbulent times
In Germany, for example, our grantee partner AlgorithmWatch along with a number of other CSOs, including Wikimedia Germany, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte and interface, successfully campaigned for the German parliament to establish an advisory body to the Digital Services Coordinator (DSC).
AlgorithmWatch not only helped ensure the formation of the board, which assists German authorities in shaping the DSA’s implementation, but the group’s Executive Director, Mathias Spielkamp, was elected by the German Parliament to serve on it.
“It’s a huge success that there are eight CSO seats in an advisory board with 16 members. This makes it special, and is one reason why it’s more than just window dressing,” Spielkamp says.
Another significant achievement from civil society’s perspective, Spielkamp adds, is that the DSC has a research budget under German law.
The advisory board’s work, however, will take place against a turbulent political backdrop.
In recent months, the US government has ratcheted up its attacks on the DSA. Spielkamp says the advisory board is still weighing up the best way to respond.
“The US administration considers DSCs part of ‘a deep state industrial censorship complex’ – which is totally ludicrous. I think they know that this isn’t censorship. They are using this for strategic effect, saying we are pro-free speech and anti-censorship; while the Europeans are pro-censorship and anti-free speech.
We’re making it clear to Germans that censorship isn’t the real issue here and that the DSA will make big tech legally accountable for everything from criminal activities on their platforms to illegal content and the sale of illegal products.”
Change is possible
Last June, our grantee partner, European Digital Rights (EDRi), the biggest European network defending online rights and freedoms, showed how this can be done: using the DSA to make big tech more accountable.
Together with their partners Global Witness, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte and Bits of Freedom, they won a notable victory for online freedom by forcing LinkedIn to stop its advertisers using sensitive data to target its users.
After gathering evidence exposing how LinkedIn allowed its advertisers to target the platform’s users based on sensitive personal data categories (such as sexuality, political opinions, or race) – forbidden under the DSA – they presented their findings to the European Commission.
The Commission then sent a formal request for information to LinkedIn: the first step in any future infringement proceeding under the DSA. A few weeks later, LinkedIn decided to abide by the law: announcing that they would no longer allow advertisers to target its users in the European Economic Area (EEA) in this invasive manner.
Jan Penfrat, Senior Policy Advisor at EDRi, led the organisation’s work on the case.
“The first thing that really struck us [about LinkedIn’s decision], is that it signals that change is possible, that these laws can function if they’re properly enforced.
This was the first real change under the DSA: something that people can feel, that advertisers will feel when they try to reach audiences.”
“Another important takeaway, is that to achieve that change you don’t always have to go all the way to the European Court of Justice: if the evidence and the law is strong enough, companies might decide it’s not worth putting all that effort into going through a long process – maybe it’s better for them to just change their practice.”
“The LinkedIn case is probably not the rule, but a positive exception, because the company handled it rather professionally,” he says. “I’m not sure whether at this stage we can expect the same from X, for example, or Meta. We have several complaints [using the DSA] in the pipeline. It will be very interesting to see if there’s going to be a real standoff, and how it plays out if tech companies start to resist compliance.
For two decades, we’ve been talking about [big tech’s] concentration of power, and how social media could be abused to manipulate or even destroy democracy, but it always felt a bit theoretical to people. Now it’s happening for real, and at a scale which people just can’t deny. That’s scary, but it also gives us the opportunity for real change.”
