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Across the EU and US, two influential digital governance regimes are producing new evidence about how large social media companies assess and respond to potential risks on their platforms. KGI’s latest report compares Meta and TikTok’s EU risk assessments with internal documents emerging from US litigation, revealing significant gaps between public claims about risk mitigation and evidence of how these risks are actually addressed.
Systemic risk assessments in the EU and legal discovery in the US are revealing new insights around how platform design and recommender systems can contribute to risk and mitigation, with a particular focus on risks and harms impacting minors.
KGI’s report “Measuring Risk I: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Meta and TikTok” examines what can be learned by reading these two bodies of emerging evidence side-by-side. The report identifies critical gaps in how Meta and TikTok communicate publicly about risks and the actual steps they take to mitigate risks based on evidence and data.
Regulatory processes in the EU and legal frameworks in the US have notable differences in scope and approach. However, they converge on a key concern: potential risks to minors. Risk assessments and investigations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as complaints in US courts have identified overlapping concerns related to compulsive use and addiction-like behaviors, sleep deprivation, self-harm, eating disorders, and other mental and physical health impacts for minors. Each regime produces distinct evidence and disclosures, creating opportunities for cross-jurisdictional learning.
KGI’s report finds that there are significant gaps between the risk mitigations that Meta and TikTok describe in their EU risk assessments and the actual effectiveness of these measures revealed through internal documents in US litigation.
While the DSA has created an obligation for platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risks in Europe, the first two years of risk assessments rely heavily on high-level company descriptions of policies, tools, and user controls. Assessments provide extremely limited detail into whether any of these interventions meaningfully reduce harm, particularly for minors. By contrast, US litigation is surfacing previously unreleased internal platform data, experiments, and deliberations that reveal how platforms internally measure risk and define acceptable trade-offs related to risk, engagement, and revenue. But US litigation is largely reactive and limited to the facts of each specific case.
Key Findings:
The evidence emerging from EU risk assessments and US platform litigation underscores a central gap in current approaches to platform governance: risks are increasingly well-described, but mitigations are rarely communicated using rigorous, outcome-oriented data and evidence.
Addressing this gap will require aligning platform expectations with rigorous research and evaluation. Systemic risk assessments in the EU should move beyond descriptive inventories of mitigations toward transparent, metrics-driven statements of risk and mitigation effectiveness. While insights generated through litigation are still emerging and incomplete, they highlight the types of data, methods, and benchmarks that should inform more credible, forward-looking platform governance.
Measuring Risk Series
Measuring Risk I: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Meta and TikTok
Measuring Risk II: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Snap and YouTube
KGI’s Age Assurance Rules provides practical recommendations for designing age assurance rules that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, service availability, competition, and openness.
KGI’s Assigning Responsibility for Age Assurance examines how policymakers can allocate responsibility for age assurance across the digital ecosystem. It provides practical recommendations for assigning age assurance obligations in ways that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, competition, accessibility, and openness.
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KGI’s Measuring Risk II report examines what EU risk assessments and US litigation reveal about Snap and YouTube’s approaches to risks on their platforms, with a particular focus on risks to minors. The report explores the gap between what these platforms publicly disclose about risk mitigation and what has emerged through discovery in US litigation, including their own internal research, product development, and risk evaluation.
