Compliance & regulation
DSA Article 14 (statement of reasons)
DSA obligation requiring online platforms to give each user a clear, machine-readable explanation when their content is moderated, what was decided, on what legal or contractual basis, and how to appeal.
Article 14 of the DSA requires that every moderation decision, removal, demotion, suspension, age restriction, comes with a statement of reasons sent to the affected user. The statement must explain :
- What was decided (removed, hidden, demoted, restricted).
- The legal basis (illegal under EU or national law) or contractual basis (terms of service violation).
- The detection method (user notice, automated tool, internal moderator).
- The appeal path : internal complaint mechanism + out-of-court dispute settlement bodies.
Article 14 also requires that statements of reasons be submitted to the DSA Transparency Database maintained by the European Commission, so the moderation activity of every platform is auditable in the open.
For a news publisher running comments, this means : every moderation action needs structured logging at the time it is taken, with the user-facing reason auto-generated and stored. Manual moderation in spreadsheets does not produce Article 14-compliant artefacts.
How Logora handles Article 14
Every automated and human moderation decision in Logora is logged with timestamp, moderator, applied rule, model version, score, and a reason text in the user’s language. The statement is delivered to the user (in-product notification + email) and pushed to the DSA Transparency Database on the publisher’s behalf via the Logora pipeline.
See DSA overview for the broader context, and transparency report for the annual reporting requirement.