Regulating transparency?: Facebook, Twitter and the German Network Enforcement Act

Regulatory regimes designed to ensure transparency often struggle to ensure that transparency is meaningful in practice. This challenge is particularly great when coupled with the widespread usage of dark patterns --- design techniques used to manipulate users. The following article analyses the implementation of the transparency provisions of the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) by Facebook and Twitter, as well as the consequences of these implementations for the effective regulation of online platforms. This question of effective regulation is particularly salient, due to an enforcement action in 2019 by Germany’s Federal Office of Justice (BfJ) against Facebook for what the BfJ claim were insufficient compliance with transparency requirements, under NetzDG.