Harmonised transparency reports under the DSA bring enhanced clarity on content moderation practices online

Last week marked the deadline for publication of the first round of harmonised transparency reports by providers of intermediary services under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA requires online services to publish at least once per year - and twice for very large online platforms (VLOPs) and search engines (VLOSEs) - data on their content moderation practices. This helps civil society and regulators to access real-life data on content moderation and keep platforms accountable for their practices, including vis-à-vis of their obligation to protect Europeans' fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech. You can access all the transparency reports of all VLOPs and VLOSEs.

Until now, the mandatory reporting varied across different services, for example due to different file formats, keywords, labels or categories.

Following the adoption of the Implementing Regulation on Transparency Reporting in July 2025, companies had over a year to adapt to the use of a new machine-readable template, which has now standardised reporting on content moderation practices across platforms with a common format as well as categories for content moderation.The changes enable researchers, journalists and citizens to access clearer, more organised information and identify trends. This enhances transparency and platforms' accountability. For example, it is now possible to easily compare the volume of moderation decisions across platforms in areas such as cyber violence, the protection of minors or scams and frauds.

Moreover, the content categories and keywords of the DSA Transparency Database now match the ones in the new harmonised transparency template, enabling consistency checks across the two DSA transparency tools at scale. This will help identify any mismatches in the reported share of content moderation actions across the different categories in the reports and in the database. The simplified reporting will provide clarity to companies and help them to more easily fulfil their transparency obligations, as both industry groups and civil society organisations have suggested.

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