  In the course of under a year, the European Commission has launched some of
the most important regulatory proposals to date on platform governance. The
Commission's goals behind cross-sectoral regulation of this sort include the
protection of markets and democracies alike. While all these acts propose
sophisticated rules for setting up new enforcement institutions and procedures,
one aspect remains highly unclear: how digital enforcement will actually take
place in practice. Focusing on the Digital Services Act (DSA), this discussion
paper critically addresses issues around social media data access for the
purpose of digital enforcement and proposes the use of a legal compliance
application programming interface (API) as a means to facilitate compliance
with the DSA and complementary European and national regulation. To
contextualize this discussion, the paper pursues two scenarios that exemplify
the harms arising out of content monetization affecting a particularly
vulnerable category of social media users: children. The two scenarios are used
to further reflect upon essential issues surrounding data access and legal
compliance with the DSA and further applicable legal standards in the field of
labour and consumer law.
