EU aims at the social media harm with the landmark new law.
The European Union (EU) has made a deal with the social media giants such as Facebook, YouTube, and other internet service providers. This deal comes with inaction concerning the harm social media causes and is causing.
The Digital Security Act, answers the harm and results in companies aggressively having a watch over the content that goes up. If any illicit content is to be found there is a risk of losing billions of dollars as a fine.
The deal will combat the spread of misinformation, disclosing the amplification of divisive content and the advertisements which are purely based on targeting the user’s ethnicity, religion, and or sexual orientation.
The tech companies under the EU will have to set up new policies and procedures to remove hate speech, terrorist propaganda, and others that are defined as illegal by the countries within the limit of the EU.
It is the end of an era of self-regulation that the tech companies have, their own set of rules and policies. The policy decides what content should be put down and what should be boosted. The giants like YouTube and Meta would face the yearly audit of “systematic risk”, the one that links their business.
The Act is a part of one-two punch by the EU. It addresses the societal and economic effects of the technological giants.
Other than the Digital Services Act other acts such as Digital Markets Act was discussed and agreed upon by the 27-nation blocs of the European Union. Social Networking sites and applications are worth trillions of dollars and are used by billions of people for purposes like communication, payments, news, and much more.
The new agreed laws of the Eu are setting global standards for tech regulation. Social media are also at par with competitive behavior. The effects social media has on elections, privacy-invading models; to combat this the officials spent a year negotiating with the tech giants.
The deal was finalized by the European Union policymakers in Brussels after 16 hours of negotiation.
Published by: Diwakar Kumar
Edited by: Aaradhana Singh
