EU Approves New Law for Social Media Sites to Monitor Content

The European Union has passed a new law that could force big tech giants such as Meta, Google, and Twitter to enforce illegal content on platforms or potentially risk paying billions of dollars.

After about 16 hours of negotiations, the EU reached an agreement on Digital Services Act in Brussels early Saturday. This is a breakthrough law that requires businesses to more actively monitor content and quickly remove what it considers harmful or illegal.

The historic vote comes more than a year later since the EU submitted the EU-approved Digital Services Act (DSA) and  Digital Markets Act (DMA) to the European Parliament last month. The EU said the law is the first in the world to cover digital regulations.

An important part of the law will limit how big tech giants can target users with online advertising. DSA effectively prevents the platform from targeting users with algorithms that use gender, race, or religion-based data. Also, it is forbidden to target children in advertising.

The new EU law will affect popular platforms for user-generated content, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, which are meta-powered sites.