Why the EU's Digital Services Act is about to reshape every major social platform

When the European Union's Digital Services Act passed in 2022, most of the public conversation focused on content moderation and the takedown of illegal material. Two years into enforcement, the practical bite of the law is showing up somewhere less visible but arguably more consequential: the design of the platforms themselves.

The DSA's second enforcement wave, which begins in Q2 2026, extends obligations that had applied only to Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to a much broader set of companies — including several that have so far escaped serious regulatory attention. For the first tier of affected platforms, obligations are by now routine: annual risk assessments, researcher access to platform data, transparency reporting on moderation decisions, and in some cases a mandated non-personalized feed option.

The second wave adds two important wrinkles. First, the Commission has refined its methodology for counting "active recipients of the service" in a way that captures several platforms that had previously flown under the 45-million-monthly-active-user threshold by spreading users across multiple product lines. Several mid-tier social networks — including some US-based platforms that had not anticipated being included — now face VLOP-level obligations with only six months to comply. Second, the Digital Markets Act is being enforced alongside the DSA in a coordinated way that is harder for platforms to game.

For US-based observers, the question isn't whether the DSA will reshape the European internet — that's already happening. The question is whether comparable rules will land stateside. The honest answer, according to a handful of policy analysts HowSociable spoke to this week, is: some of them, slowly, in a patchwork. Individual US states have begun passing DSA-adjacent rules. California's 2024 AADC-successor law includes several DSA-style provisions on algorithmic transparency for minors. New York's platform accountability bill, which passed committee in March, copies DSA language on researcher access almost verbatim.

The piece of the DSA most likely to travel is the mandated non-personalized feed option. The UK adopted a similar requirement in a consultation published last month. Australia's eSafety Commissioner has been pushing for it publicly since late 2025. If three or four major English-speaking jurisdictions land on the same rule, platforms will almost certainly build a single global implementation rather than maintain divergent regional versions — which has historically been the pattern for every mandated-interoperability feature, from cookie consent to accessibility.

Creators should pay particular attention to the researcher-access provisions. Under the DSA, designated platforms must provide vetted researchers with structured data about content recommendation and moderation decisions. Over the next year, expect a wave of academic and journalistic work analyzing platform behavior in ways that were simply not possible before — including systematic studies of how accounts of different sizes are treated by the algorithm. The resulting research will become a major input into creator strategy, the same way SEO research informs web publishing.

The DSA is not a single rule but a framework, and the framework is still being built out. For US creators watching from the sidelines, the lesson is less "this is happening to European platforms" and more "this is what comprehensive platform regulation looks like when it actually takes effect." Whether the US follows is a political question; whether US creators are affected by it is not.