04/27/2022, 16:05

Dear Supporters,

just before 2:30am on Saturday morning, EU negotiators announced they had finally reached a deal on the Digital Services Act (DSA). The law is set to lay the groundwork for regulating major online platforms in the EU and therefore central to our demands for platform transparency. Early reports show we’ve made important progress, but the devil’s in the details that are yet to be decided on.

To better understand the major implications of this, let's take a brief look back at how we got here: In April 2021, AlgorithmWatch, together with Sueddeutsche Zeitung, started a research project on Instagram and its influences on Germany’s national election campaign. Do Instagram’s algorithms polarize the public debate? Do they promote disinformation or hate speech? To find out, we asked users to donate their data – but our research project was apparently too inconvenient for Facebook. The company sought to shutter our project and pressured us to stop our work. We couldn't risk a lawsuit against a trillion-dollar corporation, which would have threatened our very existence.

But we fought back. We informed the press and started this petition. Over 6.000 people signed the open letters demanding that the EU must put transparency at the heart of the DSA. If not, major social media platforms will continue to prevent research into the risks they pose to our public debate and democratic elections online, only to avoid public scrutiny.

Now, hearing early reports of the deal, we are encouraged that the DSA will heed our demands and open the door also for civil society organizations in its data access rules! This is an incredibly important win in the fight for transparency in order to hold digital platforms accountable. This would not have been possible without your support. Once again we have seen that if enough people come together behind one cause, we can create enough pressure to change the power dynamics of our digital public sphere.

But the story is far from over. The next few weeks are crucial, when the technical details of the law will be discussed and finalized – not to mention the next months and years when the law will be enforced in practice. In particular, we remain concerned about the extent to which these companies will be able to invoke their “trade secrets” under the DSA to deny data access requests. We will keep you updated via our social media (twitter.com/algorithmwatch), our Website (algorithmwatch.org/en/) and Newsletter (algorithmwatch.org/en/newsletter/).

For more details on the DSA negotiations, read our policy analysis (algorithmwatch.org/en/dsa-deal-plattform-accountability/)