VISUA is Helping Companies Become Compliant With The European Digital Services Act
VISUA is Helping Companies Become Compliant With The European Digital Services Act Pixabay

  • The European Commission has created two new acts with the intention of making the digital environment safer and more open.

  • VISUA has developed a Visual-AI which can help businesses meet the requirements of these new acts.

  • The new acts primarily target businesses who function as a means of distributing content in the online space.

As the EU moves ahead with The European Digital Services Act, companies are scrambling to learn how to comply with the law. VISUA, one of the solution providers at the forefront of a wide range of compliance solutions, provided some insightful guidance on the matter.

The European Commission proposed two new acts to help increase the safety and openness of the digital space in the EU. These acts were the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Both of these acts were proposed in December of 2020 and they were agreed upon by the political process in March and April of 2022. Both acts form a single set of newly created rules which will be applicable across the entirety of the EU.

The acts have two main goals which they were created to achieve. These are, “to create a safer digital space in which the fundamental rights of all users of digital services are protected,” and, “to establish a level playing field to foster innovation, growth, and competitiveness, both in the European Single Market and globally.”

Digital services are a broad category of services which are accomplished using digital means and this includes all manner of websites from the simplest of websites to technological giants. The DSA is primarily concerned with online platforms which include social media, ecommerce websites and app stores.

The Need for New Legislation

The digital world is ever evolving and the pace at which it evolves often means that gaps are created in legislation. These gaps need to be covered by new legislation which addresses some of the potential for abuse which online platforms create. Whilst, overall, the benefits which online platforms produce are plentiful they are not without their downsides. This includes a number of malicious activities which include harmful or hateful content, gratuitous content, misinformation, and fraud. These activities benefit malicious actors and create a toxic environment for the ordinary consumer.

The new acts which the European Commission has created seek to minimize the potential for malicious behavior by making the platforms themselves responsible for stopping the dissemination of harmful content. This means that the malicious content creators will have no, or far fewer, channels of distribution for their content. As a result, the content which is shared will need to pass certain standards which will eliminate the malicious content and force the bad actors out of channels of distribution and dissemination.

The goal of the process is to create an online environment in which the benefits that the internet provides can be enjoyed by businesses and consumers without needing to fear bad actors. This will lead to an online world which is able to facilitate the spread of information that is both reliable and safe. In turn the rights of participants in the online space will be protected and this will allow ordinary people to be able to have a better experience in the online space. A very practical example of this is that consumers can feel sure that they will never be sold a counterfeit product when buying from bricks and mortar stores on the high street or in malls, but it is commonplace for major marketplaces to both promote and ship easily identified counterfeit goods. The DSA will make it the marketplace’s responsibility to stop this form of activity.

Additionally, several companies, such as social media giants, have private control over the majority of content which their users consume. This is a negative facet of the online environment because private individuals have an enormous amount of control over the experience of their users. The motivations for these decisions are typically not open for discussion and the social media giants are able to manipulate the dissemination of information in a manner which suits them. These acts aim to place certain restrictions on this freedom and introduce greater transparency in how content selection and moderation algorithms work for the benefit of the users of the platforms and not the platforms themselves.

A concern which many businesses may have with the acts is how they will be able to effectively moderate the content which they publish. There is an overwhelming amount of content shared and created on a daily basis and humans are too slow to be able to moderate all of this content manually. This is particularly true of visual media as a site such as YouTube sees 82 years worth of video content uploaded every day. Human power is insufficient to moderate this content efficiently and cost-effectively. Not to mention the many issues of exposing human moderators to sometimes horrifyingly depraved and disturbing content!

VISUA and Their Visual-AI

VISUA has developed a special form of AI that can scan visual media for specific content which has a wide range of use cases. These include counterfeit detection and visual content moderation. The company began developing its Visual-AI (also known as computer vision) to provide a tool for businesses to be able to automatically scan their visual content to avoid the inefficiency of people performing this task. They would prefer to see human labor being spent productively in collaborative environments for better results and happier employees.

The VISUA’s Computer Vision API utilizes a number of technologies to provide a versatile array of potential use cases. VISUA has broken down visual content into a number of vital elements which include logo, scene and text. They have developed detection technology for these elements and this is how their AI is able to have its wide range of use cases. VISUA’s AI can be used to perform monitoring tasks which are too demanding for humans. This includes advertising and brand monitoring.

Image Credit: Visua

The AI can also be used for tasks which are required of companies by the DSA and the DMA. These tasks include counterfeit detection and piracy monitoring as well as visual content moderation. The AI consumes content at machine speed and is able to detect unsavory content with a high level of accuracy. It also flags content which it is unsure of to allow a human to have the final say. It is interesting to note that VISUA has secured a reputation as a leading choice. Especially impressive when its competitors are behemoths like Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Franco De Bonis, the Marketing Director of VISUA, was recently interviewed by the journalist Ethan Frost. De Bonis said that, “Ultimately any company which is affected by the new acts will need to have achieved compliance by January of 2024. The acts focus on cyber safety which is the process of protecting people from risks in the online space. This imposes key requirements on platforms and targets the source of harmful content”.

VISUA Media Interview

Franco De Bonis spoke with journalist Ethan Frost:

Final Thoughts

Perhaps not all American and Asian businesses are fond of the ideological “single digital market” in Europe, but many are in a position that requires compliance. The new acts which the European Commission has created will attempt to make the online environment safer, more open and respectful of people's online rights. These acts place a large degree of responsibility on companies, especially those who act as a means of distribution or dissemination. These new responsibilities require new solutions to avoid the inefficiencies and waste of human labor which content moderation can create.

Besides the above mentioned regulations, there is also the “ Digital Markets Act ”to contend with. VISUA’s AI uses detection technology to automatically moderate and inspect visual content. This is incredibly helpful for businesses as it fulfills their new responsibilities in an efficient and cost-effective manner.