📖 Content moderation glossary
What is the GDPR and how does it relate to moderation?
In short
The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is the EU law, applicable since 25 May 2018, that governs the processing of personal data, including the names, messages and identifiers handled in comment moderation.
Moderating comments means processing personal data: usernames, profile information, the content of messages, sometimes IP addresses. The organisation must have a legal basis, inform users, limit retention to what is necessary and choose processors that offer sufficient guarantees.
Comments themselves can also contain personal data about third parties, such as a phone number, an address or health information. Removing doxxing quickly protects the people concerned and the organisation.
Example: a city uses a moderation tool for its Facebook page and its website. It lists the tool in its records of processing, signs a data processing agreement and checks where the data is hosted.
OpenModeration hosts its data in the EU, which simplifies the data protection analysis for European clients.