EU says TikTok and Meta broke transparency rules under landmark tech law (www.cnbc.com)

The European Commission has preliminarily found TikTok and Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA), saying both platforms failed to “grant researchers adequate access to public data.” In addition, the Commission found Meta — covering both Instagram and Facebook — did not provide users with simple mechanisms to notify illegal content or to effectively challenge content-moderation decisions. These are initial findings and the investigation is ongoing. The decision is significant because the DSA is the EU’s landmark regulatory framework designed to increase platform accountability: researcher access to public data underpins independent audits of recommendation systems, misinformation dynamics and other algorithmic harms, while clear notification and appeal flows are central to procedural fairness in content moderation. A confirmed breach could force changes to API/data-sharing policies, transparency reporting, and user-facing moderation workflows, and may trigger corrective orders or fines under the DSA. For the AI/ML community, the ruling reinforces legal expectations around data access for reproducible research and third-party algorithmic scrutiny, and signals that platforms’ technical and product designs for data access and appeals will be subject to regulatory enforcement.