TikTok, Meta, and YouTube overturned in most DSA content disputes

Major online platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have been found to “wrongly” remove online content, according to a new transparency report from the EU-certified body Appeals Centre Europe (ACE).

The findings relate to the workings of the bloc’s online governance rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which allows social media users to challenge big tech’s content moderation decisions via independent dispute settlement bodies (such as ACE).

In the report, ACE – which was certified by Ireland’s media regulator last September – said it has received more than 10,000 disputes so far, of which around 3,300 were within its scope.

More than three-quarters of these cases led to overturned platform decisions, it revealed. “The majority of these decisions recommended restoring a person’s content or account,” ACE added in a statement on Wednesday.

Examples of wrongful removals include unjustly suspended accounts, posts of individuals self-checking for cancer which were mistakenly flagged as nudity, and instances where hate speech targeting vulnerable groups was left online.

“We’ve seen hundreds of cases where social media platforms have wrongly removed content and silenced people in crucial debates,” CEO Thomas Hughes told Euractiv.

He added that some platforms remain uncooperative. “In some cases, we’ve succeeded despite platforms, not because of them,” he noted, calling out “very slow” progress with YouTube.

A spokesperson for YouTube claimed that ACE had not put sufficient “privacy safeguards” in place for it to share user data to resolve content moderation decisions.

Since US president Donald Trump was returned to the White House at the start of this year, the DSA has been under sharp criticism from his administration. Several big tech CEOs have joined in, labelling the EU regulation a “censorship” tool and threat to free speech.

After months of silence, the Commission finally blasted back in August – with spokesperson Thomas Regnier suggesting that the DSA is actually a tool to fight censorship by big tech.

The DSA has given EU users clear ways to contest the social media platform giants’ moderation decisions, he told journalists this summer, adding that “almost 35% of these removals were unjustified and therefore overturned and restored”.

EU Tech Commissioner Henna Virkkunen prefigured this position in May, during an interview with Euractiv, citing data that showed platforms were responsible for the overwhelming majority of content takedowns. Between September 2023 and April 2024, 99% of removals were linked to the terms and conditions of Meta and X (formerly Twitter), she said.

UPDATE: Updated at 14:28 on 1 October with YouTube’s response 

(nl)