Photo by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images
Just days before the deadline, Meta is making changes to users' feeds in the EU, to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The company's been ordered to comply, by August 25, with the DSA, which requires platforms defined as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to give users the option of switching off personalization and reverting to a non-algorithmic feed.
TikTok made a similar move earlier this month, removing personalized results for its For You feed, and automatically opting users between 13 and 17 out of personalized ads based on their previous activity.
The DSA, says president of global affairs Nick Clegg, is "a big deal not just for European tech companies but for all tech companies that operate in the EU, and it will have a significant impact on the experiences Europeans have when they open their phones or fire up their laptops."
EU users will be able to view Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels from only accounts that they follow, in chronological order from newest to oldest, and see search results based only on the words they enter, rather than personalized specifically to them on the basis of their previous activity.
Meta is also, again to comply with the DSA, making changes to improve transparency. It's expanding its Ad Library to display and archive all ads that target people in the EU, along with the dates the ad ran, the parameters used for targeting—age, gender, location and the like—and who the ad was shown to. Ads will be stored for a year.
And, building on its Why Am I Seeing This feature, the company is also releasing 22 system cards for Facebook and Instagram. These contain information about how the AI systems rank content for Feed, Reels, and Stories, along with some of the ways each system determines what's relevant content, and the customization options available.
Meanwhile, two new tools for researchers—the Meta Content Library and API—will allow them to search, explore, and filter the publicly available content on a graphical user interface, or through a programmatic API.
"These tools will provide the most comprehensive access to publicly-available content across Facebook and Instagram of any research tool we have built to date," says Clegg.
The move brings a very different experience for EU users, compared with those elsewhere, such as the U.S. and the UK—and it's more than possible that the company will eventually extend some of these privacy rights worldwide.
Certainly, the company is trying to present itself as supportive of the DSA.
"It is right to seek to hold large platforms like ours to account through things like reporting and auditing, rather than attempting to micromanage individual pieces of content," says Clegg.
"In this new regulatory environment, it is critical that the DSA now maintains its primacy over existing and new national laws, to protect the clarity it has created for services, maintain consistency in the way tech companies are held to account, and preserve the harmonious way people experience our platforms across the region."
