Dark patterns that manipulate consumer behaviour are now a pervasive feature of digital markets. Depending on the choice architecture utilised, they can affect the perception, behaviour and purchasing patterns of online consumers. Using a novel empirical design, we find strong evidence that individuals across all groups are susceptible to dark patterns, and only weak evidence that user susceptibility is materially affected by commonly used general proxies for consumer vulnerability (such as income, educational attainment or age). Our conclusions provide empirical support for broad restrictions on the use of dark patterns, such as those contained in the EU’s Digital Services Act, that protect all consumer groups. Our study also finds that added friction, in the form of required payment action following successful deployment of dark patterns, reduces their effectiveness. This insight highlights the instances in which dark patterns would be most effective – when no further action is required by the user. Consumer vulnerability is therefore more pronounced when dealing with online providers who store users’ payment details and can rely on a ‘single click’ to complete the purchase.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) introduces a new regulatory approach to address the societal harms of online platforms: Systemic risk assessments. While a core component of the DSA, the regulation only outlines the standards and processes governing systemic risk assessments in broad strokes. It remains unclear what these systemic risk assesments will entail in practice. This Article develops a proposal of how systemic risk assessments should be implemented. It situates systemic risk assessments as a critical step toward platform accountability as they address societal harms, while existing approaches, such as remedy mechanisms, only protect user rights. Engaging with intangible harms and regulating speech and public discourse, risk assessments also entail significant challenges. Conventional reference points for content moderation regulation, such as terms and conditions, contractual freedom, fundamental rights and expertise, do not provide practical and legitimate bases to concretize risk assessment obligations. Public actors, such as the European Commission, should refrain from defining substantive standards, too, as they are directly bound by freedom of expression guarantees. Instead, the Article argues, the Commission should foster a procedural framework, a “virtuous loop,” which empowers civil society and allows it to specify and refine the standards governing systemic risks over time. Developing this framework, the Article explains how systemic risk assessment can fix “multistakeholderism,” and “multistakeholderism,” in turn, can help make systemic risk assessments work.

Large online platforms provide an unprecedented means for exercising freedom of expression online and wield enormous power over public participation in the online democratic space. However, it is increasingly clear that their systems, where (automated) content moderation decisions are taken based on a platformʼs terms and conditions (T&Cs), are fundamentally broken. Content moderation systems have been said to undermine freedom of expression, especially where important public interest speech ends up suppressed, such as speech by minority and marginalized groups. Indeed, these content moderation systems have been criticized for their overly vague rules of operation, inconsistent enforcement, and an overdependence on automation. Therefore, in order to better protect freedom of expression online, international human rights bodies and civil society organizations have argued that platforms “should incorporate directly” principles of fundamental rights law into their T&Cs. Under EU law, and apart from a rule in the Terrorist Content Regulation, platforms had until recently no explicit obligation to incorporate fundamental rights into their T&Cs. However, an important provision in the Digital Services Act (DSA) will change this. Crucially, Article 14 DSA lays down new rules on how platforms can enforce their T&Cs, including that platforms must have “due regard” to the “fundamental rights” of users under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. In this article, we critically examine the topic of enforceability of fundamental rights via T&Cs through the prism of Article 14 DSA. We ask whether this provision requires platforms to apply EU fundamental rights law and to what extent this may curb the power of Big Tech over online speech. We conclude that Article 14 will make it possible, in principle, to establish the indirect horizontal effect of fundamental rights in the relationship between online platforms and their users. But in order for the application and enforcement of T&Cs to take due regard of fundamental rights, Article 14 must be operationalized within the framework of the international and European fundamental rights standards. If this is possible Article 14 may fulfil its revolutionary potential.

This Article considers the role of ideas in shaping law and policy processes, serving to facilitate certain actions or approaches while curtailing others. Using the development of the EU’s governance approach to online service providers and platforms, this Article demonstrates how ordoliberalism as a set of beliefs regarding the regulation of market activity through law have shaped the understanding of appropriate measures for combating hybrid threats such as disinformation. Highlighting the origins of the E-Commerce Directive and the influence of ordoliberalism in the application of a regulated self-regulation model, the Article explores how ordoliberal philosophical ideas have influenced programme and policy level ideas concerning EU cyberspace governance as it relates to online platform activities. Even where there has been discursive change regarding the role of online platforms in contributing to an environment of insecurity, there has nevertheless been ideational continuity in the approach to their regulation, dictating the legal response in the Digital Services Act.

On 15 December 2020, the European Commission published its proposal for the Digital Services Act, which is expected to be adopted before summer 2022. It carries out a regulatory overhaul of the twenty-one-year-old horizontal rules on intermediary liability in the e-Commerce Directive and introduces new due diligence obligations for intermediary services. Our analysis illuminates an important point that has so far received little attention: how would the Digital Services Act’s rules interact with existing sector-specific lex specialis rules? In this article, we look specifically at the intersection of the Digital Services Act with the regime for online content-sharing service providers (OCSSPs) set forth in Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive). At first glance, these regimes do not appear to overlap, as the rules on copyright are lex specialis to the Digital Services Act. A closer look shows a more complex and nuanced picture. Our analysis concludes that the Digital Services Act will apply to OCSSPs insofar as it contains rules that regulate matters not covered by Article 17 CDSM Directive, as well as specific rules on matters where Article 17 leaves a margin of discretion to Member States. This includes, to varying degrees, rules in the Digital Services Act relating to the liability of intermediary providers and to due diligence obligations for online platforms of different sizes. Importantly, we consider that such rules apply even where Article 17 CDSM Directive contains specific (but less precise) regulation on the matter. From a normative perspective, this might be a desirable outcome, to the extent that the Digital Services Act aims to establish “uniform rules for a safe, predictable and trusted online environment, where fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter are effectively protected”. Based on our analysis, we suggest a number of clarifications that might help us to achieve that goal.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are playing an overarching role in the disinformation phenomenon our world is currently facing. Such systems boost the problem not only by increasing opportunities to create realistic AI-generated fake content, but also, and essentially, by facilitating the dissemination of disinformation to a targeted audience and at scale by malicious stakeholders. This situation entails multiple ethical and human rights concerns, in particular regarding human dignity, autonomy, democracy, and peace. In reaction, other AI systems are developed to detect and moderate disinformation online. Such systems do not escape from ethical and human rights concerns either, especially regarding freedom of expression and information. Having originally started with ascending co-regulation, the European Union (EU) is now heading toward descending co-regulation of the phenomenon. In particular, the Digital Services Act proposal provides for transparency obligations and external audit for very large online platforms’ recommender systems and content moderation. While with this proposal, the Commission focusses on the regulation of content considered as problematic, the EU Parliament and the EU Council call for enhancing access to trustworthy content. In light of our study, we stress that the disinformation problem is mainly caused by the business model of the web that is based on advertising revenues, and that adapting this model would reduce the problem considerably. We also observe that while AI systems are inappropriate to moderate disinformation content online, and even to detect such content, they may be more appropriate to counter the manipulation of the digital ecosystem.

This paper focuses on consumer-generated reviews (CGRs), which are an increasingly influential source of consumer information. In particular, the paper highlights specific problems associated with CGRs, which questions their role as a reliable information source. Flowing from this, the paper calls for closer regulatory scrutiny of review platforms, which play an important intermediary role in facilitating the provision of CGRs. To this end, the paper considers possible regulatory responses in the EU which may address some of the issues highlighted.