PORTUGAL Trends and Developments Contributed by: Luís Portela de Carvalho, Pedro Cortés and Cláudia de Azevedo Neves, Lektou
European enforcement At European level, DSA enforcement is already a reality. The European Commission has opened pro - ceedings against major platforms and has imposed significant fines, while internal complaint-handling and out-of-court dispute settlement mechanisms are being used at significant scale. A particularly relevant example is X, formerly Twitter. In December 2025, the European Commission imposed a fine of EUR120 million for non-compliance with transparency obligations under the DSA, including issues relating to the design of the verification system, the advertising repository and researchers’ access to public data. In January 2026, the Commission opened a further investigation concerning X’s recommender systems and Grok, its AI-powered chatbot. More recently, on 28 May 2026, the Commission fined Temu EUR200 million for failing to diligently identify, analyse and assess systemic risks relating to illegal products offered on the platform and resulting harm to EU consumers. The Temu decision reinforces that systemic risk assessment is not a box-ticking exercise and is particularly relevant for marketplaces where trader traceability and illegal product risks are promi - nent. In May 2026, the Commission also preliminarily found that TikTok’s addictive design breaches the DSA. This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommend - er system. The case is particularly significant because it shows that DSA enforcement is not limited to illegal content or transparency reporting: it also extends to the design of online services, including features that may affect minors, mental well-being and users’ ability to control their online experience. The Commission has also opened formal proceedings against other platforms, including Shein on 17 Febru - ary 2026 and Snapchat on 26 March 2026, signalling that enforcement activity continues to expand across the designated VLOP landscape. Portugal: representative actions and litigation risk In Portugal, litigation against large platforms shows that the risk is not merely administrative.
The DSA in Practice: Transparency, Enforcement and Litigation Risk Transparency reports: turning scale into evidence The DSA’s transparency obligations may require pro - viders to report on notices relating to illegal content, moderation decisions, orders from authorities, com - plaints, internal complaint-handling systems, out-of- court dispute settlement, automated tools and human resources dedicated to moderation. TikTok illustrates the scale that the DSA makes vis - ible. In its sixth DSA transparency report, covering the second half of 2025, the platform stated that it had 178 million monthly active recipients in the EU and had removed around 112 million pieces of content for breach of its terms and policies, including videos, livestreams, advertisements, product listings and, for the first time, comments. The report also states that 93.8% of infringing content was handled by automated systems without human review, with 97.6% of automated decisions confirmed as correct. These figures reveal an important shift: content moderation is becoming measurable, audit - able and comparable. AliExpress provides a second illustration of the prac - tical scale of these obligations. In its transparency report for the period from July to December 2025, the platform notes that it was designated by the European Commission as a very large online platform, or VLOP, and identifies approximately 181.9 million monthly active recipients of the service in the EU, of whom more than 5.7 million were in Portugal. The same report refers to 701,165 initial notices, 393,997 moderation decisions, an average action time of 14 hours, 238 orders from member state authorities to act against illegal content and 273 orders to provide information, all of which were complied with. Taken together, these figures help to show that the DSA is not merely a legal exercise: it is a regime that requires operational capacity, trained teams and sys - tems capable of responding at scale.
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