The European Commission has launched an official investigation into AliExpress, the international e-commerce website run by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
It is reported that pornographic and other illegal content is allegedly distributed on AliExpress. This points to potential problems with moderation, which is subject to very strict requirements in the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force this month.
Earlier, the EU issued warnings about issues with moderation to Meta, and X and TikTok received own investigations. If a violation is confirmed, companies may be fined up to 6% of their global annual turnover.
CNBC notes that the commission will additionally check whether AliExpress has complied with its own terms of service — in terms of prohibiting health-risk products or counterfeit medicines.
In general, the list includes «very large platforms» (with more than 45 million users) subject to DSA regulation 19 platforms were included — AliExpress, Amazon, App Store, Bing, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Zalando.