From Self to Co-Regulation in the European Commission’s Approach to Disinformation and the DSA: How Big Tech’s Preemptive Cooperation Protects Their Business Model at the Expense of Democracy

The increasing pre-eminence of social media platforms during the last decade has opened a wide political and regulatory debate about the role that these companies play in the public sphere, and democracy more broadly. In this paper, we analyse the emerging regulatory battle by focusing on one specific dimension of it, disinformation, and one specific actor, the European Commission. The most influential initiative has taken place within the 2022 approved Digital Services Act (DSA), an approach characterised by a ‘co-regulatory’ approach, which breaks away from the EU’s previously dominant approach of self-regulation to digital platforms by trying to regulate with these platforms rather than simply leaving these platforms to set their own policies. The best illustration of this approach is the second version of the Code of Practice on disinformation, which has been ultimately included within the DSA. We ask: How did the European Commission come to adopt a co-regulation approach to disinformation? We use process-tracing, field theory and network analysis to trace the cooperation and competition relations and relations among the actors involved in the DSA and the code of practice on disinformation included in it.