Analysis and opinion on DSA developments: Prohibiting platforms' content moderation for media might undermine efforts dealing with disinformation

In his article at Tech Policy Press, SNV project director Julian Jaursch uses a recent example to show how important it is to consider the possible side effects of rules when it comes to platform regulation. This particular case is about the Digital Services Act (DSA), with which the EU is planning new rules for large tech corporations such as Facebook/Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Among other things, the aim is to improve transparency of content moderation. However, the European Parliament also discussed whether content moderation by platforms should even be allowed for media publishers. Such a prohibition of content moderation for media publishers is intended to strengthen the independence of the media, but could mean that not even fact checking and labels with additional sources could be displayed, which could undermine the goal of tackling disinformation. Lessons for tech regulation can be drawn from this debate, as the post describes.