Yesterday, the European Commission slapped AliExpress with the largest fine yet under the Digital Services Act (DSA), exceeding $625 million.
In a press release, the EC said that AliExpress failed to “diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform.”
Officials found that AliExpress not only failed to staff teams dedicated to removing counterfeit and dangerous items from the platform, but it also made it easy for bad actors to evade detection.
Staff was so limited that some content moderators were sometimes given just “tens of seconds” to evaluate if a flagged product met EU standards, The Guardian reported. The result, the EC said, was that it “found millions of products that reappeared online” after being flagged for removal, “which sometimes stayed for longer than a month.”
Bad actors can easily skirt AliExpress safeguards, the EC said. All some sellers had to do to circumvent automatic takedowns was miscategorize their products so that fewer checks were required before posting dangerous goods.
For shady sellers, the risks of detection appeared low. The e-commerce site’s mandatory brand authorization system was also ineffective and understaffed, the EC found, and AliExpress did not penalize traders for selling illegal products as its policy claims it would.
Making things worse, AliExpress “inadequately assessed how its recommender and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products,” the EC said. So rather than remove illegal products, AliExpress was recommending them to consumers and helping to maximize exposure. Talking to the press, the European Union’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, noted that one in five Europeans shop monthly at retail sites like AliExpress, Temu, and Shein.
AliExpress also relied on a single quantitative metric to gauge how effectively its systems were working to weed out illegal products. And that metric did not properly measure the extent of the harm. EC testing found that “a high volume of illegal products”—including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics—“continued to circulate despite AliExpress’ moderation efforts.”
