Regulating Transparency? Facebook, Twitter and the German Network Enforcement Act

Regulating Transparency? Facebook, Twitter and the GermanNetwork Enforcement ActBen WagnerVienna University of Economics [email protected] RozgonyiUniversity of ViennaMarie-Therese SekwenzVienna University of Economics andBusinessJennifer CobbeUniversity of CambridgeJatinder SinghUniversity of CambridgeABSTRACTRegulatory regimes designed to ensure transparency often struggleto ensure that transparency is meaningful in practice. This challengeis particularly great when coupled with the widespread usage ofdark patterns — design techniques used to manipulate users. Thefollowing article analyses the implementation of the transparencyprovisions of the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG)by Facebook and Twitter, as well as the consequences of theseimplementations for the effective regulation of online platforms.This question of effective regulation is particularly salient, due to anenforcement action in 2019 by Germany’s Federal Office of Justice(Bf J) against Facebook for what the Bf J claim were insufficientcompliance with transparency requirements, under NetzDG.This article provides an overview of the transparency require-ments of NetzDG and contrasts these with the transparency re-quirements of other relevant regulations. It will then discuss howtransparency concerns not only providing data, but also how thevisibility of the data that is made transparent is managed, by decid-ing how the data is provided and is framed. We will then providean empirical analysis of the design choices made by Facebook andTwitter, to assess the ways in which their implementations differ.The consequences of these two divergent implementations on in-terface design and user behaviour are then discussed, through acomparison of the transparency reports and reporting mechanismsused by Facebook and Twitter.