User Empowerment in the Digital Services Act: Redirecting Platforms’ Influence through Transparency and Controllability of Recommender System

This thesis examines how the Digital Services Act (DSA)’s provisions on the transparency and controllability of recom- mender systems (RSs) empower users to redirect the influ- ence that platforms exert on them through three intercon- nected disciplinary pillars. The philosophical pillar connects the user empowerment principle grounding the DSA with an ontology of influence of RSs: this conceptualization is used to argue in favour of user control as a design paradigm on which a substantive application of the DSA provisions should be based to address the harms generated by RSs. Secondly, the legal pillar outlines the main EU legal sources concerning RSs and discusses their practical implementation by examin- ing the respective stages of platform compliance and regula- tory enforcement. Subsequently, legal analysis and design are bridged to propose principles for meaningful personalization through RSs and a transparent and pluralistic enforcement of the DSA systemic risk framework. Thirdly, the empirical pil- lar highlights how users use control options for RSs and per- ceive the impact of these controls on their experience through studies on a realistic purpose-built short-video platform. The original design of the control features for short-video recom- mendations of the platform operationalizes the principles of proportionality and granularity introduced in the legal pillar, thereby representing an initial blueprint for the standardiza- tion of the DSA requirements on the transparency and con- trollability of RSs. All together, the three pillars provide a multi-layered core sample of the complex and rapidly evolv- ing field of RS regulation, with each interrelated perspective illuminating a distinct dimension of its development.