BRUSSELS — As major online platforms released their first EU-mandated official moderation reports this week, the European Union’s commissioner announced Thursday that steps have been taken to initiate an investigation regarding X, TikTok and Meta’s compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA).
A Commission spokesperson later clarified that although the EU’s executive body has not launched a formal investigation into the platforms, they had been formally asked to submit information on moderation, particularly of misinformation.
Earlier on Thursday, European Commissioner Thierry Breton “called out X, Meta and TikTok for disinformation and harmful content on their platforms spreading in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” tech news site The Messenger reported.
Breton added that following an investigation, a judge “can possibly ban them temporarily if things don’t go well.”
This week, several companies published their first DSA transparency reports regarding moderation. These include companies designated “Very Large Online Platforms” and “Very Large Online Search Engines” according to DSA definitions.
The first seven platforms to publish the reports were Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Zalando and Bing. Other companies have until Nov. 6 to do so.
Meta also published reports for Facebook and Instagram on Friday.
Finally, Some Hard Data
The Facebook report, covering April-September 2023, disclosed over 2 million instances of posts removed for adult nudity and sexual activity, almost all as the result of automated removal processes. The only categories with more posts removed were spam, with almost 20 million, and hate speech, with 2.8 million. Only 230,000 removals in the adult category were challenged, and of those, less than half were restored.
The Instagram report covering the same period disclosed almost a million instances of posts removed for adult nudity and sexual activity, also overwhelmingly the result of automated removal processes. The categories of spam, and violence and incitement, had more posts removed, with 1.5 million and 1.1 million respectively. In the adult category, 83,000 removals were challenged; of those, only 24,000 were restored.
The Pinterest report revealed that “between Aug. 25 and Sept.24 alone, the app’s moderators removed 6.8 million adult-related posts on its platform, by far the largest volume of violations by category, and limited the circulation of an additional 11.1 million pornographic posts on its platform,” The Messenger reported.
The Amazon report revealed that in the first half of the year, the retail behemoth “took 274 million actions on its own initiative to remove content that violates policy, or other types of non-illegal content” and received 8,863 legal requests from EU governments for information about its users, Reuters reported.
