Compliance & regulation
Transparency report
Annual document required by the DSA in which a platform, including news websites that host comments, discloses volumes, response times, automated tools and outcomes of its content moderation activity.
A transparency report is the document that the DSA requires every online platform, including news websites that host user comments, to publish at least once a year. It discloses how the platform handled user-generated content during the reporting period : how much was moderated, how, by whom, how quickly, and with what outcomes.
What the DSA expects (Article 24)
The core data points to publish are :
- Volume of content moderated, broken down by type of action (removed, demoted, age-restricted, label-added).
- Reason for action : illegality, terms-of-service violation, etc.
- Detection method : user notice, automated tool, internal review.
- Response times : median time from notice to action.
- Appeals and reversals : how many users contested decisions, and the outcomes.
- Statements of reasons sent to users.
- Languages in which the moderation operated.
The DSA also expects the report to be machine-readable (JSON or CSV) so researchers, regulators and journalists can audit it.
What this means operationally
To produce a credible transparency report, you need to log every moderation decision at the time it is taken, with structured fields (timestamp, actor, rule applied, reason text, action). If your moderation happens in spreadsheets or in a vendor’s UI without exportable logs, you cannot produce the report.
This is one of the biggest practical gaps between EU-native and US-platform comment systems. The latter often have UIs for moderation but not the audit trail the DSA expects, especially when AI is involved.
How Logora handles transparency reports
Logora was built with this requirement in mind from day one :
- Every moderation decision (human or AI) is journalised with timestamp, moderator ID, applied rule, model version, score, reason text.
- The user-facing statement of reasons is auto-generated in the reader’s language.
- An admin export assembles the annual transparency report in a few minutes from the moderation log, CSV + JSON + a publication-ready PDF.
- Logora’s own group-level aggregate report is published on
docs.logora.fr/transparencyto give publishers a reference template.
Related concepts
- DSA, the underlying regulation
- Content moderation, the work being reported
- AI moderation, automated layer
See the positioning map for how transparency posture differs between EU-native and US-platform vendors.