In October 2025, the Dutch digital rights group Bits of Freedom won a significant victory in the long battle for people to reclaim control over what they view online.
Bits of Freedom filed a case in September against Meta for breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) by not offering Instagram and Facebook users the option of choosing a feed not based on profiling: the first time that a CSO has legally forced a platform to change its design.
The Court of Justice in Amsterdam, where the case was heard, ruled that Meta had violated the DSA. The way that Meta designed its platforms, said the judge, constituted “a significant disruption of the autonomy of Facebook and Instagram users.”
Meta subsequently lost their appeal against the decision and will face potentially increased penalties for non-compliance. The ruling’s practical upshot is that Facebook and Instagram users in the Netherlands now have the freedom to choose what appears on their feeds, and the hope is that the case will encourage other EU Member States to follow suit.
Evelyn Austin, Bits of Freedom’s Executive Director, traces how the case unfolded, and outlines their wider efforts to release tech companies’ stranglehold over where we get our information and how we view the world.
“Bits of Freedom was founded in 1999 on the promise of the internet: the idea that it was going to redistribute power, that it would end gatekeepers, and allow everyone to have a voice.
There was a period when that was the overriding sentiment, and of course, the internet still brings a lot of good to a lot of people and empowers movements around the world. But as Bruce Schneier (a Board member of AccessNow) says: the powerful woke up to the power of the internet, and they have more power to amplify. So overall, at the moment, we’re looking at corporate and government power that has grown far more than that of citizens. And we might soon see a marriage of big tech and Big Brother.
We went from [trusting that] the internet would self-regulate and was a place that governments should stay far away from, to now often looking to governments for more regulation.
Our focus has always been the right to privacy and freedom of communication. Because of their strong technical background, a lot of digital rights organisations at the time when we were founded realised the potential as well as the risks the internet held.
One thing that always really surprises me is how similar the topics are that Bits of Freedom works on now compared to then.
The focus on corporate surveillance and therefore government regulation [to curb it] has been the biggest shift: we went from [trusting that] the internet would self-regulate and was a place that governments should stay far away from, to now often looking to governments for more regulation.
Over the last decade or so, a lot of our work has been focused on the big tech platforms. We’ve been trying to regulate their data and content moderation and recommendation practices.
We were thrilled when the DSA was introduced, even though we wanted more from the law than we ended up getting, we still think that it’s a really helpful tool to break the power that these companies have over our societies.
Based on our experience with GDPR, the European privacy legislation that we also worked on, we realised that the companies the DSA aims to regulate probably weren’t going to interpret the law – to put it nicely – the same way we would. Therefore it was important to stay vigilant and do our own research, looking into how they’re designing their platforms and the content moderation, redress and complaint systems that the law requires them to have. Are they really working in the way that users need them to work?
The US’ changing geo-political position with regards to Europe at the beginning of 2025 heightened the urgency to tackle this.
Manipulative design
One of the most exciting things that we thought the DSA offered was prohibiting manipulative design, and requiring very large platforms, if they offer an algorithmic recommendation system, to always offer one that’s not based on profiling: meaning that it’s not individualised, and based on the sometimes decade worth of data that these companies have collected on you.
The reason we thought these articles of the DSA [27, 38, 25] are so interesting is because they really have the chance to give some autonomy back to users, to increase their possibility of making informed choices and shaping their own information environments.
This is about controlling what content you see, rather than having Meta or Google decide based on what they think you will be most susceptible to, and of course, being guided by their own [commercial] interests and not yours – and definitely not democracy’s.
We were thinking especially about design measures that the tech companies have taken to increase time spent on their platforms, and to increase the likelihood that you share as much data as possible with them.
This is about controlling what content you see, rather than having Meta or Google decide based on what they think you will be most susceptible to, and of course, being guided by their own [commercial] interests and not yours – and definitely not democracy’s.
So we filed a complaint against Meta under the DSA, because on Facebook and Instagram they sometimes offer this non-profiling algorithm, but there’s no way for users to set it as their default option. Also, every time you would go to this different feed, you would lose essential functionality. So it seemed a very clear breach. And it was also very clear that Meta really wanted you to stay in the feed that it compiles for you.
In June 2025 our government fell and new elections were called for October. We thought that election time is as important as any for having control over your information diet and understanding where information is coming from. So we decided to go to court. We had the first hearing in September and the very positive ruling from the court in October.
Meta has now changed its platforms for users in the Netherlands, so on Facebook and Instagram, Dutch users can opt out of Meta’s profiling – and addictive – feed.
Of course Meta also appealed, but withdrew all their substantive arguments a few days before the hearing.
Deeply ingrained
The Netherlands has been an easy country to be an NGO in compared to many others, but we aren’t immune to pressure from the US.
In September, we were asked by the Dutch Digital Services Coordinator (DSC) to attend a meeting that they organised, where they brought together big tech and civil society to discuss election risks. Recently the US House of Representatives published a report referring to the meeting as an example of the EU governments and European NGOs trying to interfere with free speech and elections.
We’ve never really had to deal with really adversarial contexts, so this was kind of a wake-up call, and we know that organisations that work on the DSA are under scrutiny.
These companies have a huge hold on most of Europe through the grip that they have on our communications. Big tech is deeply ingrained in our societies: for instance, something like 70% of all municipalities in the Netherlands run almost solely on Microsoft, and our House of Parliament, police and hospitals all run on big tech infrastructure”
