Only small services with fewer than 50 employees and annual turnover of under €10 million (around $10.8 million) are exempt.
Soon: large platforms firing everyone but 49 employees, and outsourcing all their operations to hundreds of companies with fewer than 49 employees each... all owned by the same shareholders.
sites will have to provide a reason to users when their content or account has been moderated, and offer them a way of complaining and challenging the decision. There are also rules around giving users the ability to flag illegal goods and services found on a platform.
It is at the scale they are working on, there's a reason you can't get an actual person to contact you... It's too expensive to have actual people working these cases
Making sure their turnover also gets split into hundreds of companies seems like an administrative nightmare though. And I suspect the EU regulators are smart enough to see through such a ruse - eBay would still be one website, not hundreds, after all.
Just put the moderation business into a separate entity with no real revenue, which has no more than 49 regular employees and employ the rest as freelancers. Bam.
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication and access to information! No government will ever be able to censor information anymore because they will lack legal reach to censor everything!
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The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a tough new piece of regulation that imposes new rules around content moderation and online advertising, is about to expand to cover huge swathes of the internet.
The Associated Press notes that this will include household names like eBay and OnlyFans, which didn’t hit the 45 million monthly active user threshold in the EU for VLOP status.
“From tomorrow, the Digital Services Act rules apply to all online platforms accessed by users in the EU,” said the European Commission’s Margrethe Vestager.
Although the DSA is still a new piece of regulation, we’ve already seen the EU use it to open a formal investigation into X over, among other things, concerns it may have facilitated “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” EU regulators have the ability to fine companies up to 6 percent of their worldwide annual turnover for breaking the DSA’s rules, and even block services as a last resort.
While this deadline has been a long time coming, there are concerns that EU member states aren’t ready to enforce the DSA’s rules more broadly.
Earlier this week, Politico reported that only a third of EU countries have nominated their local regulators (named Digital Services Coordinators), who will be expected to handle user complaints and generally enforce the DSA in each member state.