DSA Transparency Reports Clarify Content Moderation

EC Digital Strategy News (AI Act)

Published July 1st, 2025

Detected March 7th, 2026

Summary

The EU has published harmonised transparency reports under the Digital Services Act (DSA), standardising content moderation data reporting for online services. This follows the adoption of an Implementing Regulation in July 2025, with the first reports due by March 2026.

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What changed

The European Commission has announced the publication of the first round of harmonised transparency reports required under the Digital Services Act (DSA). This initiative standardises how providers of intermediary services, particularly Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), report on their content moderation practices. An Implementing Regulation adopted in July 2025 established a machine-readable template and common categories for content moderation, replacing previous varied reporting formats. This aims to enhance clarity, facilitate comparisons across platforms, and improve accountability regarding fundamental rights protection.

Regulated entities, specifically VLOPs and VLOSEs, were required to publish these reports by March 2026. The new standardised template and categories within the DSA Transparency Database are intended to simplify compliance and provide clearer, more organised data for researchers, journalists, and citizens. While the document highlights the deadline has passed for the first round, it implies ongoing obligations for annual or semi-annual reporting depending on platform size. Compliance with these harmonised reporting requirements is mandatory under the DSA.

What to do next

Ensure content moderation transparency reports comply with the harmonised template and categories established by the DSA Implementing Regulation.
Verify that reporting frequency meets DSA requirements (at least annually, twice for VLOPs/VLOSEs).
Utilise the DSA Transparency Database for consistency checks with reported data.

Source document (simplified)

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.