Regulating Disinformation and Ideological Entrepreneurs: An Exploratory Research on the Digital Services Act Implementation

Abstract

The introduction of the Digital Services Act (DSA) by the EU marks a fundamental step in the governance of social media platforms, by outlining content-moderation guidelines aimed at preventing disinformation and the systemic risks related to the "business of polarization" for the digital public sphere (Geese, 2023). According to others (Husovec, 2023b), DSA is an ambitious legal framework that must be tamed in consideration of the priorities of different stakeholders: platforms, legislators at the European and national level, journalists responding to the challenges of fact-checking, and citizens entitled to participate in a safe and non-discriminatory public sphere. Thanks to a critical approach (Van Dijck, 2021; Zuboff, 2019), the article discusses how platforms manage controversial political influencers: the ideological entrepreneurs. From the point of view of the empirical analysis, the essay identifies ambiguities in the DSA text that neither clarify the role of ideological entrepreneurs nor explicitly outline the concept of disinformation. Furthermore, a longitudinal analysis (18 months) of the content moderation measures implemented in compliance with the DSA and accessible thanks to the DSA Transparency Database, shows that social media platforms tend to privilege temporary measures such as accounts suspension, rather than more effective actions such as deplatforming (Van Dijck et al., 2023). This reflects ongoing tensions in the regulation of digital services, especially when balancing innovation in governance with the protection of the democratic information environment. As a result, the article highlights a double-standard policy adopted by platforms towards the influencers: On one side they actively contribute to feeding the flow of disinformation and fake news, but on the other hand, they enable platforms to generate visibility and traffic, thus reinforcing the "business of polarization" typical of surveillance capitalism.