Meta and TikTok have dealt a blow to the European Commission’s social media rule book, pressing the EU executive to codify how it calculates the number of users on online platforms. The General Court at the Court of Justice of the European Union sided with the social media companies on Wednesday in their challenge of an annual supervisory fee the European Union charges to pay for the enforcement of its tech rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). It’s the first major court loss for the Commission over the DSA, which entered into force in 2022 and can be wielded to fine social media and e-commerce platforms up to 6 percent of their global annual revenue. The EU has yet to finalize investigations under the law. At the heart of the case are platforms’ disagreements with how the EU calculated the fee. The Commission directly supervises “very large online platforms” with over 45 million average monthly users in the bloc. Meta and TikTok challenged the European Commission’s decisions imposing so-called supervisory fees in 2024. These fees are meant to support the Commission’s work overseeing the very platforms that pay it — an extension of the “polluter pays” principle often used in environmental policy — and are proportionate to the number of users platforms have in the EU. The EU’s General Court said in its ruling the Commission should have passed a separate set of rules about how users are calculated before determining the fees. Judges gave the Commission a year to draft a text on how it calculates platform users, or else potentially refund the platforms’ 2023 fees. The EU executive has already been working on such rules, called a delegated act. The Commission said the court merely ruled against it on procedure and not substance. “The Court confirms our methodology is sound: no error in calculation, no suspension of any payments, no problem with the principle of the fee nor the amount,” said spokesperson Thomas Regnier. Meta said in a statement that the judgement “will force the European Commission to reassess the unfair methodology being used to calculate these DSA fees,” adding it “looks forward to the flaws in the methodology being addressed.” TikTok “welcomed” the decision and will “closely follow the development” of the case, company spokesperson Paolo Ganino said.

The United States Congress is amping up criticism of the European Union’s social media law — and this time, they’ve brought receipts. The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is releasing a report on Friday that singles out the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as a “foreign censorship threat.” The report, shared exclusively with POLITICO, describes the flagship social media law as a “comprehensive digital censorship law” that threatens the freedom of speech of American citizens. The White House and U.S. State Department have been going after the EU’s digital rulebook for months, accusing the bloc of unfair, burdensome rules that target American companies and free speech. On the European side, proponents of these laws want to see them enforced strictly, including on U.S. technology giants. Some EU officials have argued that Washington officials are simply fronting the arguments of their homegrown tech firms. The Judiciary Committee’s 37-page “interim staff report” is the result of a five-month, still-ongoing inquiry that started with subpoenas issued by the U.S. Congress in February to Big Tech companies. Evidence attached to the report includes correspondence between top European Commission officials and Jim Jordan, the Republican representative from Ohio and chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. It also includes non-public information about how the European Commission and national authorities implement the rules, including confidential information from EU workshops, emails between the EU executive and companies, content takedown requests in France, Germany and Poland and readouts from Commission meetings with tech firms. “On paper, the DSA is bad. In practice, it is even worse,” the report said. “European censors” at the Commission and EU countries “target core political speech that is neither harmful nor illegal, attempting to stifle debate on topics such as immigration and the environment,” it said. Their censorship is “largely one-sided” against conservatives, it added. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a comment that freedom of expression “is a fundamental right in the EU. And it is at the heart of our legislations, including the DSA.” He added: “Absolutely nothing in the DSA requires a platform to remove lawful content.” According to the Commission, “more than 99 percent of content moderation decisions are in fact taken proactively by online platforms to enforce their own Terms & Conditions” and “content removals based on regulatory authorities’ orders to act against illegal content account for less than 0.001 percent,” Regnier said. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan is set to lead a bipartisan congressional delegation to Europe in the coming days, including a stop in Brussels, to discuss issues of censorship and free speech, a source familiar with the planning said. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS The Commission’s line is that the DSA is apolitical and doesn’t determine what speech is illegal. But the U.S. committee said that behind closed doors it draws a line in the sand. At the workshop, which POLITICO reported exclusively in March, the Commission asked Big Tech platforms, regulators and civil society how they would react to different scenarios. One scenario involved a user being exposed to the phrase “We need to take back our country.” In this scenario on “illegal content,” the statement appeared under a photo of a woman in a hijab with the caption “terrorist in disguise,” the documents show. The Commission said the user in question would be exposed to “illegal hate speech.” The committee argued that the phrase “take back our country” is “a common, anodyne political statement” used by the likes of Kamala Harris. The Commission also instructed platforms to address memes and satirical content at the workshop. According to the U.S. committee’s report, the EU kept the workshop secret because the “Commission wants to hide its censorship aims.” The Commission regularly meets with technology companies and other stakeholders to give information on its policymaking. Some of these meetings — including those informing its competition cases — occur in public, while others take place under varying levels of confidentiality. The committee report also criticized a system of third parties, comprising trusted flaggers and out-of-court settlement dispute bodies, as being neither impartial nor independent of authorities. The report criticized the need for fact-checkers to be approved by regulators. It stated that it had identified various conflicts of interest stemming from these organizations’ goals, funding, or litigation against tech platforms. The report also criticized the regime set up for Very Large Online Platforms, those with more than 45 million monthly active users in the bloc. VLOP designations are “used to burden” non-EU firms, while EU firms are afforded workarounds, it said. One case that drew the attention of U.S. representatives: Spotify has been allowed to split its products into music and podcasts, thus avoiding the more cumbersome VLOP rules. In the first quarter of 2025, the Swedish firm reported 689 million monthly active users with 37 percent of its subscribers based in Europe.

The European Commission on Monday said countries can implement their own national bans for minors on social media, in new guidelines under its powerful Digital Services Act. The EU executive has been under pressure in recent months to roll out measures to protect minors online. National governments in France, Denmark, Spain and elsewhere have called for social media restrictions, with some criticizing the EU for not acting quickly enough. France and the Netherlands have supported an outright ban of social media for minors under 15. Greece has said it thinks parental consent should be required for children under a certain age. Denmark, which currently helms work in the Council of the EU, is pushing for stronger EU-level actions. Tech giant Meta has also come out suggesting legal restrictions that would require parents to consent for their kids being on social media below a certain age. “Age verification is not a nice to have. It’s absolutely essential,” said Denmark’s digital minister Caroline Stage Olsen, who presented the guidelines alongside the Commission’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen. The Commission’s new guidelines for minor protection online seek to make sure platforms face a similar set of rules across Europe under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the bloc’s landmark social media regulation. The guidelines are non-binding and set the benchmark for companies to interpret requirements under the DSA. The Commission on Monday also released technical specifications for an age verification app that could help verify if users are over 18 by using IDs and even facial recognition. The app is set to be tested in France, Greece, Spain, Italy and Denmark, five countries that are also pushing for restrictions and are working on their own age verification solutions. EU countries can also use the app should they decide to implement national restrictions for social media use at a different age threshold, a senior Commission official said, granted anonymity to disclose details of the plan ahead of its release. High-risk services like porn platforms and online alcohol shops are also recommended to verify users’ ages. “It’s hard to imagine a world where kids can enter a store to buy alcohol, go to a nightclub by simply stating that they are old enough, no bouncers, no ID checks, just a simple yes, I am over the age of 18,” but this is what “has been the case online for many years,” said Stage Olsen. Monday’s guidelines cover how platforms should adapt their systems to better protect kids along a range of services. The text suggested that platforms do not use browsing behavior in their recommender systems; that they turn off features like streaks and read receipts to decrease the addictiveness of platforms; that they set privacy and security by default in settings, for example making their accounts invisible to other users not in their networks; and that they consider turning off some features like camera access. The guidelines follow a risk-based approach, meaning platforms can evaluate what possible threats they pose to minors and adopt measures accordingly. Tech firms launched a last-minute lobbying push arguing that the guidelines still allow for cumbersome fragmentation. This article was updated.