BWL XI: Paper accepted at WWW

Abstract:

The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires large social media platforms in the EU to provide clear and specific information whenever they remove or restrict access to certain content. These "Statements of Reasons" (SoRs) are collected in the DSA Transparency Database to ensure transparency and scrutiny of content moderation decisions of the providers of online platforms. In this work, we empirically analyze 156 million SoRs within an observation period of two months to provide an early look at content moderation decisions of social media platforms in the EU. Our empirical analysis yields the following main findings: (i) There are vast differences in the frequency of content moderation across platforms. For instance, TikTok performs more than 350 times more content moderation decisions per user than X/Twitter. (ii) Content moderation is most commonly applied for text and videos, whereas images and other content formats undergo moderation less frequently. (ii) The primary reasons for moderation include content falling outside the platform's scope of service, illegal/harmful speech, and pornography/sexualized content, with moderation of misinformation being relatively uncommon. (iii) The majority of rule-breaking content is detected and decided upon via automated means rather than manual intervention. However, X/Twitter reports that it relies solely on non-automated methods. (iv) There is significant variation in the content moderation actions taken across platforms. Altogether, our study implies inconsistencies in how social media platforms implement their obligations under the DSA -- resulting in a fragmented outcome that the DSA is meant to avoid. Our findings have important implications for regulators to clarify existing guidelines or lay out more specific rules that ensure common standards on how social media providers handle rule-breaking content on their platforms.

A preprint of the paper is available on arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04431)