Published on
The European Commission has notified Chinese online marketplace AliExpress that it is in breach of the bloc’s online platform rules for not taking enough measures to counter illegal products.
Preliminary results of its investigation into the platform’s alleged breaches the Digital Services Act (DSA) – EU rules that oblige online platforms to counter illegal content and products online – were sent to AliExpress on Tuesday.
The Commission’s began an investigation in March 2024 focussing on several areas including risk mitigation, content moderation and the internal complaint handling mechanism, as well as transparency of advertising and recommender systems.
The Commission’s preliminary findings suggest that AliExpress devotes limited resources to moderation systems designed to avoid the dissemination of illegal products, underplaying risks.
“The company also fails to appropriately enforce its penalty policy concerning traders that repeatedly post illegal content, and its content moderation systems show systemic failures, making the systems less effective and allowing manipulation by malicious traders,” the Commission’s statement said.
The platform now has time to react to the findings before the Commission decides on next steps. If the EU executive confirms the breach in a final decision, it could impose a fine of up to 6% of the company’s global turnover.
Some commitments accepted
At the same time, the Commission accepted voluntary commitments made by the platform on some of the other grievances of the probe and made them binding.
The commitments related to the notice and action mechanism, transparency of advertising and data access for researchers as well as the platform’s systems to monitor and detect illegal products, such as medicines, food supplements and others which could affect users’ health and minors’ well-being.
By making the commitments binding, the Commission closed these parts of the investigation.
The AliExpress case is the second most advanced DSA probe since the platform rules entered into force late 2023. The Commission also sent preliminary findings to X related to risk management, content moderation and dark patterns. It has further investigations pending into platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Under the DSA, companies with more than 45 million users are considered Very Large Online Platforms (VLOP) meaning that they face stricter rules to fight illegal and harmful content and counterfeit products on their platforms.
