By Mauro Orru and Christian Moess Laursen


The European Union is investigating whether Meta Platforms shirked responsibility in tackling disinformation and misleading advertising in breach of its sweeping digital-competition law ahead of EU elections in June.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said Tuesday that it had opened formal proceedings against Facebook and Instagram over suspected infringements of the Digital Services Act when it comes to deceptive advertising and political content on Meta's services.

"We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms," a Meta spokesperson said. "We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work."

Approved in 2022, the Digital Services Act requires large social-media platforms to take steps to deal with content that regulators view as harmful, and give users an avenue to register their complaints about content moderation.

The announcement of formal proceedings comes as social-media platforms face growing scrutiny over their efforts to remove fake content and misleading information in an era when artificial intelligence tools make it easier for bad actors to manipulate content and depict public figures endorsing specific political views.

"Deceptive advertising is a risk to our online debate and ultimately to our rights as both consumers and citizens," said Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition czar. "We suspect that Meta's moderation is insufficient, that it lacks transparency of advertisements and content moderation procedures."

The EU commission suspects Meta isn't doing enough to tackle the dissemination of deceptive advertisements, disinformation campaigns and bots ahead of European elections running from June 6 to 9. The bloc also said Meta's policy to demote political content in algorithm recommendations of Instagram and Facebook, including their feeds, doesn't comply with the Digital Services Act.

Meanwhile, Meta is planning to shut down CrowdTangle, a data tool long used by academic researchers, journalists and others to monitor the spread of content on its Facebook and Instagram services. The company will replace CrowdTangle with a tool called the Meta Content Library, which will be available only to academic and nonprofit researchers, not to most news outlets.

The EU said the company doesn't have an adequate replacement and is concerned the move to decommission CrowdTangle could harm civic discourse and electoral processes given that Meta's platforms count more than 250 million active users a month in the bloc.


Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com and Christian Moess Laursen at christian.moess@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-30-24 1048ET