A progressive report on the Digital Services Act (DSA) adopted by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) in the European Parliament in July is the first major improvement of the draft law presented by the European Commission in December. MEPs expressed support for default protections from tracking and profiling for the purposes of advertising and recommending or ranking content. Now the ball is in the court of the leading committee on internal market and consumer protection (IMCO), which received 1313 pages of amendments to be voted in November. Panoptykon Foundation explores if the Parliament would succeed in adopting a position that will contest the power of dominant online platforms which shape the digital public sphere in line with their commercial interests, at the expense of individuals and societies.

The District Court in Warsaw (Appellate Division) upheld its interim measures ruling from 2019 in which it temporarily prohibited Facebook from removing fan pages, run by the Polish NGO “SIN”, on Facebook and Instagram, as well as from blocking individual posts. This means that – until the case is decided – SIN’s activists may carry out their drugs-related education on the platform without concerns that they will suddenly lose the possibility to communicate with their audience. The decision is now final. What does it mean on the broader scale?

We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, when it comes to the ePrivacy Regulation, on which work began in 2017.

On 22 March 2021, a group of journalists and activists published a letter they had received from the non-existent “Agency of National Security” on their social media profiles, informing them that they were subject to surveillance. The letter was accompanied by a message notifying them that it is part of a campaign launched by EDRi member Panoptykon Foundation that aims to demonstrate the problem of unscrutinised powers of intelligence agencies.

The Digital Freedom Fund prepared an animation explaining the SIN versus Facebook case, in which Panoptykon Foundation fights against private censorship online. WATCH