The Case for a Legal Compliance API for the Enforcement of the EU's Digital Services Act on Social Media Platforms
It tackles the challenge of digital enforcement for regulators and platforms under new EU regulations, but is a discussion paper without empirical results, making it incremental in proposing a technical solution.
The paper addresses the unclear practical enforcement of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) on social media platforms, proposing a legal compliance API to facilitate data access and compliance, illustrated through scenarios involving harms to children from content monetization.
In the course of under a year, the European Commission has launched some of the most important regulatory proposals to date on platform governance. The Commission's goals behind cross-sectoral regulation of this sort include the protection of markets and democracies alike. While all these acts propose sophisticated rules for setting up new enforcement institutions and procedures, one aspect remains highly unclear: how digital enforcement will actually take place in practice. Focusing on the Digital Services Act (DSA), this discussion paper critically addresses issues around social media data access for the purpose of digital enforcement and proposes the use of a legal compliance application programming interface (API) as a means to facilitate compliance with the DSA and complementary European and national regulation. To contextualize this discussion, the paper pursues two scenarios that exemplify the harms arising out of content monetization affecting a particularly vulnerable category of social media users: children. The two scenarios are used to further reflect upon essential issues surrounding data access and legal compliance with the DSA and further applicable legal standards in the field of labour and consumer law.