Digital Services Act (DSA)

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the European Union regulation that sets harmonised rules for online intermediaries, including news websites that host user comments and debates. It entered into full application in February 2024 and applies directly across all 27 EU member states.

Who is concerned

The DSA applies to any online platform that hosts user-generated content for EU users. News publishers fall under the scope as soon as they let readers comment, debate, or contribute on their site. The level of obligations scales with the platform’s size:

• All platforms must publish transparency reports, designate a point of contact, and run a notice-and-action mechanism.
• Online platforms (above the micro/small enterprise threshold) face additional rules: statement of reasons for moderation decisions, internal complaint-handling, out-of-court dispute settlement.
• Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), 45M+ monthly EU users, face the heaviest obligations: risk assessments, independent audits, researcher access.

A regional daily with 2M monthly visitors is an online platform under the DSA. A publisher with hundreds of millions of EU readers may be a VLOP.

Key obligations for news publishers

The four most operational obligations are:

1. Statement of reasons. Every moderation decision (removing a comment, demoting a contribution, suspending a user) must be accompanied by a clear explanation sent to the affected user, with the legal or contractual basis.
2. Notice-and-action mechanism. Users must be able to flag illegal content easily. The platform must process flags diligently and respond.
3. Transparency report. Once a year, publish moderation volumes, response times, automated tools used, and outcomes. Logora generates this report automatically from moderation logs.
4. Terms of service. Conditions of use must be clear, in the languages of the EU users, and accessible.

How Logora handles the DSA out of the box

Logora is built with DSA compliance in mind:

• Every moderation decision is journalised (timestamp, moderator, rule applied, reason text), exportable on demand.
• The notice-and-action flow is baked into the comment widget, readers flag in one click, the moderation team triages in the admin.
• Statements of reasons are auto-generated in the user’s language when a decision is taken.
• The annual transparency report can be assembled in minutes from the admin export.

This is one of the recurring reasons why European newsrooms move to Logora from US-based platforms (Disqus, Viafoura, OpenWeb) that do not natively produce DSA-grade compliance artefacts.

Related concepts

• GDPR, the data protection complement of the DSA
• Transparency report, what to publish
• Content moderation, the moderation work itself
• AI moderation, the automated layer

See also our detailed comparison page on the DSA-readiness of major comment platforms, DSA posture is the single biggest differentiator between EU-native and US-platform vendors.