The Case for a Legal Compliance API for the Enforcement of the EU's Digital Services Act on Social Media Platforms

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a Legal Compliance API to streamline enforcement of the EU's Digital Services Act on social media platforms, addressing practical challenges in data access and compliance.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a Legal Compliance API to improve enforcement of the DSA and discusses practical issues through scenarios involving vulnerable users.

Findings

Legal Compliance API can facilitate compliance with the DSA

Data access issues hinder effective enforcement

Scenarios highlight risks to vulnerable users

Abstract

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.