The Digital Services Act (DSA) has introduced several transparency provisions for providers of online platforms, strengthening users’ rights to information about the content moderation systems they are subjected to. In particular, online platforms are obliged to inform their users of the content moderation decisions they take and explain the reasons behind those decisions in so-called Statements of Reasons (SoR). To enhance transparency and facilitate scrutiny over content moderation decisions, platforms have to submit these SoRs to a publicly available database, the “DSA Transparency Database", managed by the European Commission.

This database allows to track a standardised set of metadata about each content moderation decision (with any personal data removed) taken by providers of online platforms in almost real-time. Its website also offers various tools for accessing, analyzing, and downloading the information related to the content moderation decisions taken by online platforms, contributing to the monitoring of the dissemination of illegal and harmful content online.

However, due to their size and number of attributes, accessing and analyzing these data has been a significant challenge for researchers. To address this, the Transparency Database team has developed dsa_tdb, a Python package that enables users to easily access, analyze, and inspect the Statements of Reasons listed in the Transparency Database.

This talk will showcase the capabilities of dsa_tdb, highlighting its potential for researchers, policymakers, and civil society organizations. We will demonstrate the wide array of tools that the package (and its containerized application) offers to users featuring different levels of technical knowledge, from quick dashboarding and visualizations to more advanced data processing. We will also show how the package can be used to uncover trends and patterns in platform content moderation activities and discuss the implications of these findings for the development of more transparent and accountable online ecosystems.

In addition to presenting dsa_tdb, we will also discuss the broader transparency provisions introduced by the DSA, including the database tracking the online platforms’ terms and conditions, the Advertisement repositories, the Transparency reports, and the Transparency Database itself. We will explore how these provisions can be leveraged to promote greater transparency and accountability in the digital services sector, and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with their implementation.

You can check the dsa_tdb code repository here: https://code.europa.eu/dsa/transparency-database/dsa-tdb

... as well as its online documentation: https://dsa.pages.code.europa.eu/transparency-database/dsa-tdb/