The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a crucial piece of EU digital legislation that tackles online harms and improves the standing of individual users vis-a-vis the largest online services. As part of the new regime, all intermediary providers (i.e. all services covered by the regulation) are obliged to publish annual transparency reports concerning their respective content moderation efforts. While this particular obligation kicks in only on the 17th of February 2024, platforms designated as VLOPSEs (VeryLarge Online Platforms and Search Engines) have to publish biannual transparency reports with additional information concerning primarily the human resources dedicated to content moderation in each of the EU member states. As article (art.) 42 DSA states, VLOPSEs must publish their first transparency reports at the latest by two months after the obligations referred to in the DSA had begun to apply.
For this, the first batch of VLOPSEs (19 services) published their first transparency reports in the last week of October 2023. Considering the speed at which the regulation has been implemented, it is no wonder that the published transparency reports lack any sort of standardisation regarding the structure or format, as well as a shared understanding of the required metrics. The reports comprise hundreds of pages filled with often incomprehensible qualitative and quantitative data.
Council for Media Services (CMS) is responsible, as per art. 110 of the Slovak Media Services Act, to conduct analysis and research to map and apprehend the media landscape. Considering the novelty of the transparency reports, as well as the historic opaqueness of the VLOPSEs, CMS prepared a short brief on the contents of the transparency reports to help stakeholders navigate the current trends in content moderation and platform functioning.