Digital Services Act (debate)
Speaker: Alexandra GEESE (Germany, Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance / Bündnis 90/Die Grünen)
Date: 2022-01-19

  Alexandra Geese,  on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Mr President, the internet used to be a wonderful place: a place for sharing knowledge, discovering the world, meeting new people; a marketplace and a public square where everybody with a connection could take part in the conversation. What a marvellous invention.
Today, we’re looking at the shambles of that marvellous world: the Rohingya genocide promoted on Facebook, teenage girls driven to anorexia by Instagram. The storm on Capitol Hill was the wake-up call. How will our democracy survive with social media spreading hate and lies?
Tomorrow we will be taking a very important step toward saving our democracy and free internet, because censorship can never be the solution in a free country. Neither governments nor platforms have the right to censor legal speech. And I would like to say to my colleague from the free right: this is exactly what the Digital Services Act is not doing. What the European Union is achieving with the DSA is to hold platforms accountable for what they do and not for what their users think.
So what do the platforms do? They collect data – their users’ data or the citizens’ data, because you don’t even need to have a Google or Facebook account to be spied on. And then platforms use that data to build very comprehensive profiles of every one of us, which they use for two things: sell us ads and keep us on the platforms as long as possible, recommending us content that will make us interact as long as possible, to which we are vulnerable.
Unfortunately, psychological research shows that what makes us interact and stay on platforms are two emotions: anger and fear. And this is why content that arouses anger and fear goes viral in the internet: it increases platforms’ profits. That’s why the recommender systems disseminate hateful speech and disinformation at far higher speed than anything else. And it is not true that the internet is a perfect mirror of the real world. It’s a completely distorted mirror, and the content is being distorted to increase platforms’ profits.
So how does the DSA increase these challenges? It starts with very basic things. Orders by national authorities need to be respected. Users have clear rights. Complaint mechanisms, independent dispute settlement will be in place.
What do we do to protect citizens? We take a few steps, but we don’t go far enough. We will ban surveillance advertising for our children, for minors, but not for adults. We should have and could have done more.
This week, Silicon Valley representative Anna Eshoo and others introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to ban surveillance advertising. This is what we should have done. What we did do, and I’m very proud of this: we opened the black box that very large online platforms today represent, with risk assessments where platforms have to look into the risk their business model and their algorithms themselves present for human dignity, for example, with independent audits and with, above all, access to the data for independent research, for independent and NGOs to study and assess compliance.
This way we will finally be able to shed light on the platforms’ practices, collect evidence and tell the stories of how targeting and engagement-based ranking tampers with democracies, and we will be able to build a better and freer internet.
The DSA is a first step, but it is the fundamental law for the digital world, and I am extremely proud that Europe is the first democratic continent to take this important step. It will shine. Its light will shine.