📖 Content moderation glossary
What is illegal content?
In short
Under the Digital Services Act, illegal content is any information that, in itself or in relation to an activity, does not comply with EU law or the law of a member state; the DSA does not itself define what is illegal but refers to those laws.
What counts as illegal therefore varies between countries: defamation, incitement to hatred, threats, child sexual abuse material, terrorist content, the sale of counterfeit goods, copyright infringement and certain forms of harassment are common examples.
Illegal content is distinct from content that is legal but against a service's rules, such as rudeness, off-topic posts or spam. A host can remove both, but the legal ground differs: in a statement of reasons, it must say whether it relied on the law or on its own terms and conditions.
Example: a comment calling a minister incompetent is legal criticism. A comment falsely accusing a named local shopkeeper of theft may be defamatory, and a comment calling for violence against a religious group may be illegal incitement. The first stays; the others should be assessed and, if illegal, removed.
OpenModeration moderates according to each client's rules and records a written reason for each decision, which helps distinguish breaches of the law from breaches of the comment policy.