The European Commission has accused Chinese online platform Temu of violating EU rules on digital services, accusing it of failing to adequately assess the risks associated with selling illegal or dangerous products in the EU.

Regulators believe Temu is not doing enough to protect consumers from potentially dangerous goods, such as substandard baby toys and small electrical appliances. “There is strong evidence that EU consumers are at high risk of encountering illegal products on the platform,” the EC said in its preliminary findings.

The investigation is also based on a so-called “mystery shopper” methodology, in which inspectors found that consumers were “very likely” to come across unregulated products among the items on offer.

Although Temu only entered the European market in 2023, the platform already has 93.7 million monthly active users across the 27 EU countries. The Commission claims that Temu’s risk assessment in October 2024 was “inaccurate and based on general industry information rather than specific data from its own platform.”

Temu is under investigation under the new Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires the world’s largest technology companies to improve consumer protection and better control the content and goods on their platforms. If the violations are confirmed, Temu could be fined up to 6% of its global annual turnover and forced to change its policies and algorithms.

However, the issue of EU digital sovereignty has caused tension with Washington. The US administration under President Donald Trump has strongly criticized the DSA, with the Republican House Judiciary Committee calling the law a “threat of foreign censorship” in a report last Friday.

On Monday, the committee’s chairman and Trump ally, Jim Jordan, will meet in Brussels with the European Commissioner for Technology, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkunen.

In addition to Temu, the EU is also investigating AliExpress, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, and is also considering imposing a €2 fee on every low-cost shipment that is entering the bloc en masse. Last year alone, 4.6 billion such shipments entered the EU, 91% of which came from China. This number is expected to increase further. | BGNES, AFP