Media / Publication
September 22, 2025

Trading nuance for scale? Platform observability and content governance under the DSA

Keywords: Digital Services Act, content moderation, platform governance, automated moderation, EU regulation, algorithmic governance, transparency database.

AlgoSoc scholars Dr Charis Papaevangelou and Dr Fabio Votta (both from the University of Amsterdam) published their interdisciplinary study aiming to better understand how platforms govern online content. Their study involved the analysis of more than 400 million Statements of Reasons from the DSA Transparency Database.

Their key findings:

1) EU-wide enforcement dominates
Over 99% of moderation decisions are applied uniformly across the EU/EEA. Only three platforms—TikTok, YouTube, and X—show meaningful territorial differentiation. This raises important questions about how cultural and linguistic contexts are taken into account.

2) Automation drives speed and scale
Automated content moderation is strongly associated with faster, EU/EEA-wide enforcement. By contrast, manual processes are slower and more localised—for example, on French YouTube, some cases took more than 100 days to resolve.

3) Limits to observability
The DSA is an important step toward making platforms more observable, allowing for systematic scrutiny of content governance. However, key metadata—such as the language of the content—are still missing. This makes it difficult to assess how moderation works in smaller countries or low-resource languages.

Their conclusion: while the DSA’s transparency efforts open new opportunities to understand how platforms moderate content, they also risk cementing a highly automated and industrialised model of content moderation—one that prioritises scale and compliance over contextual nuance.

This open access article was published in Internet Policy Review (volume 14, issue 3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.14763/2025....

Papaevangelou, C., & Votta, F. (2025). Trading nuance for scale? Platform observability and content governance under the DSA. Internet Policy Review, 14(3).