The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) comes into force on Friday, August 25th, setting out new rules for internet browsing in member countries and forcing tech firms to adapt to these restrictive conditions designed to better guarantee confidentiality.
Meta has therefore announced that its two main platforms, Facebook and Meta, will henceforth be offering non-personalised information feeds to their users.
The DSA stipulates that users of these services must be able to deactivate the personalisation of content offered by artificial intelligence, which until now has been based on tracking users in order to profile them. Users will be offered a non-algorithmic feed based solely on chronology or local popularity.
The aim is to guarantee greater confidentiality for users but also to encourage them to browse independently and avoid the effects of bubbles or addiction. The way algorithms work is not neutral for users. A few months ago, the suicide of a young American teenager highlighted the responsibility of social media in his death: caught in a spiral of depression, the young man was constantly offered content that kept him in a state of malaise or spoke of suicide until he committed the fatal act.
The Chinese company TikTok preceded Meta by making a similar announcement at the beginning of the month about the depersonalisation of its content. Meta has not yet committed to a fixed date for the end of its artificial intelligence-based tool, but the August 25th deadline for DSA to go live is approaching, and any delay could have dire financial consequences. The European authorities have announced that failure to comply with the regulations could result in penalties of up to 6% of annual worldwide turnover.
For the time being, the implementation of non-personalised content is only planned for European Union countries—neither the United States nor the United Kingdom are therefore affected.
The deactivation of personalised content will be on a voluntary basis; it will not be systematic; the user must simply be given the choice, as the DSA stipulates. The stakes are high for Meta, as a large part of its revenue is based on personalised advertising, and its aim is not to scare away advertisers. So it’s all a question of education: the platform needs to convince its subscribers not to completely disable personalisation in order to guarantee the flow of advertising, and to do this, it is relying on aggressive communication about transparency and the use of user data. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this has been a particularly sensitive issue for Meta, which intends to go even further than European Union requirements.
Through Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, the company announced that it is working on a number of complementary tools, such as a library of publicly accessible Facebook content for researchers who regularly complain that they cannot work as they wish to better understand Facebook and its impact on society.
