Recommender Systems in the EU: from Responsibility to Regulation

Over recent years, the EU has increasingly looked at the regulation of various forms of automation and the use of algorithms. For recommender systems specifically, two recent legislative proposals by the European Commission, the Digital Services Act from December 2020 and the Artificial Intelligence Act from April 2021, are of interest. This article analyses the recent legislative proposals with a view to identify the regulatory trajectory. Whereas the instruments differ in scope, it argues that both may -directly and indirectly- regulate various aspects of recommender systems and thereby influence the debate on how to ensure responsible, not opaque, machines that recommend information to humans.