📖 Content moderation glossary
What is a hosting service under the DSA?
In short
Under the Digital Services Act, a hosting service is an intermediary service that stores information provided by, and at the request of, its users; an online platform is a hosting service that also disseminates that information to the public.
Hosting services benefit from a liability exemption: they are not liable for illegal content stored at a user's request as long as they have no actual knowledge of it and act expeditiously to remove it once they do. The DSA also imposes on them notice and action (Article 16) and statements of reasons (Article 17).
Online platforms, such as social networks or marketplaces, have additional duties, including the internal complaint-handling system (Article 20) and trusted flaggers (Article 22). The recitals of the DSA note that a comment section on an online newspaper can be a minor, ancillary feature that does not by itself make the newspaper an online platform; each case has to be assessed.
Example: a regional media group that runs its own comment system stores readers' comments on its servers. For those comments, it acts as a host and should be able to receive reports and explain its moderation decisions.
OpenModeration provides the DSA building blocks hosts typically need: report handling, statements of reasons, human review of contested decisions and exportable figures.