Understanding Systemic Risks under the Digital Services Act

At Tech Policy Press, we’re closely following the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Union law designed to regulate online platforms and services. One of the DSA’s key objectives is to identify and mitigate systemic risks.But how do we gauge what rises to the level of a systemic risk? How do we get the sort of information we need from platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risk, and how do we create the kinds of collaborations between regulators and the research community that are necessary to answer complex questions?

Ramsha Jahangir, a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press, recently discussed these questions with Dr. Oliver Marsh, who is head of tech research at Algorithm Watch, an NGO with offices in Berlin and Zurich that works on issues at the intersection of technology and society. Dr. Marsh has been leading research on systemic risks and the DSA’s approach, and just put out a detailed summary of his work.