📖 Content moderation glossary
What is the Digital Services Act (DSA)?
In short
The Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) is the European Union regulation that sets rules for intermediary services, including hosting services and online platforms, on handling illegal content, moderation transparency and users' rights.
The DSA has applied to all services in its scope since 17 February 2024. It replaces part of the e-Commerce Directive's framework and keeps the principle that hosts are not liable for content they are unaware of, while adding procedural duties on how they handle content.
Its obligations are layered: some apply to all intermediary services, more to hosting services, more again to online platforms, and the heaviest to very large online platforms and search engines with over 45 million average monthly active users in the EU. Key articles for moderation include notice and action (Article 16), statement of reasons (Article 17), internal complaint handling (Article 20), trusted flaggers (Article 22) and transparency reporting (Articles 15 and 24).
For a media site, a brand or a public body that hosts comments, the practical questions are: can people report illegal content easily, do we explain our decisions, can users contest them, and can we produce figures on our moderation? Whether each obligation applies depends on the service and its size.
OpenModeration provides DSA building blocks: handling of reports, a statement of reasons for decisions, human review of contested decisions and exportable figures, with hosting in the EU. Reports and contested decisions are handled by our team, and you follow everything in real time.