The European Commission opened a formal investigation on Thursday to review if the online retail service AliExpress, owned by the Chinese giant Alibaba Group Holding Limited, has breached the regulations by failing to protect consumers from pornographic content exposure and products that pose health risks.
In the formal document, the EC says that that AliExpress potentially violated provisions of the Digital Services Act (DSA) concerning to "management and mitigation of risks, to content moderation and the internal complaint handling mechanism, to the transparency of advertising and recommender systems, to the traceability of traders and to data access for researchers."
In addition, the EC will asses if the platform is failing in imposing "effective measures" to stop influencers and certain businesses when "promoting illegal or harmful products."
