DSA Transparency Database : Questions and Answers

Article 17 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) requires all providers of hosting services to provide clear and specific information, called statements of reasons, to users whenever they remove or otherwise restrict access to their content.

Additionally, Article 24 (5) of the DSA requires providers of online platforms, which are a type of hosting service, to send all their statements of reasons to the Commission’s DSA Transparency Database for collection. The database is publicly accessible and machine-readable.

Hosting services include a broad range of online intermediaries, for example cloud and webhosting services. These services store information provided by, and at the request of, users.

The DSA Transparency Database only collects statements of reasons from online platforms, a subset of hosting services. Online platforms, such as online marketplaces, app stores, or social networks, not only store information provided by users but also disseminate it publicly. That is, they make it available to potentially all users of an online platform.

Providers of online platforms are obliged to remove any personal data from the information they publish in the DSA Transparency Database, in accordance with Article 24(5) of the DSA. In case personal data is included in any of the statements of reasons, the Commission can be notified using the ‘Report an issue’ button.

Redress options are also not included in the DSA Transparency Database as those are relevant only for the addressee of the statement of reasons.

The DSA Transparency Database was created in line with Article 24(5) of the DSA to enable more transparency and scrutiny over the content moderation decisions taken by providers of online platforms, and to better monitor the
spread of illegal and harmful content online.

The DSA Transparency Database is publicly accessible. It allows people to search for, read and download statements of reasons. For an interactive overview over the statements of reasons contained in the DSA Transparency Database, visit the Analytics of the DSA Transparency Database.

The DSA Transparency Database dashboard offers a user-friendly way to quickly access summarised information on statements of reasons submitted by providers of online platforms. You can navigate across various sections of the dashboard with different visualisations to obtain a comprehensive overview of the data.

Each visualisation can be customised by several filters to find the information you are looking for. For example, you can look at specific online platforms, search for a specific time frame or find a specific type of restriction. The dashboard is designed to streamline the process of extracting meaningful insights from the DSA Transparency Database.

To learn more about the navigation and filtering options of the dashboard, you can visit the “Instructions” page of the dashboard.  

We are always looking to improve the dashboard and its functionalities, including the available filters. In offering filtering options, the dashboard seeks to strike a balance between customizability and complexity, within the technical constraints of the database. For this reason, filtering options or breakdowns by member states or languages are currently not implemented. However, we are actively exploring solutions to incorporate such features in the future to enhance the dashboard's capabilities. To access the complete array of categories, you can make use of the “Data download” page, which provides access to the entire database schema via daily files.

For more information about the data included in the DSA Transparency Database, please visit the Documentation page. It explains what type of information is collected, and how the different data fields map onto Article 17 of the DSA, which lays down the information required in a statement of reasons. Several attributes included in the DSA Transparency database can be used to filter the aggregate visualisations of the DSA Transparency database dashboard. For more information on how to navigate the dashboard & the information contained in it, please visit the “Instructions” page of the dashboard.

The “Search for statements of reasons” page offers you the option to search the free text fields of the statements of reasons in the database for keywords of your choice.

When you click on the “Advanced Search” button, you are redirected to the “Advanced Search” page where you can look for statements of reasons from specific platforms or timeframes. You can also filter the statements of reasons according to any other data field (e.g. a specific type of restriction or keyword) that you are interested in.

Please note that a data retention policy applies.

The DSA Transparency Database is subject to a data retention policy to lower its computational footprint and guarantee a flawless user experience. The data retention policy can be resumed as follows: after a Statement of Reasons (SoR) is successfully inserted in the database, it is available from the following day in the “Search for statements of reasons”, on the dashboard, and in the daily dumps posted in the “Data Download”. After six months (180 days), the SoR will be removed from the search functionality, but it will be present in the daily dumps, and it will still contribute to the Dashboard. After 18 months (540 days), the daily dumps are removed from the data download section and are archived in a cold storage. The dashboard will provide long-term access to aggregated statistics for the last 5 years.

The dashboard will contain the aggregated statistics for the last 5 years of data. Please note that this retention policy is subject to change and may be updated as necessary.

Search data will be retained for six months (180 days). Please note that this retention policy is subject to change and may be updated as necessary.

Daily dumps (.csv files) will be retained for 18 months (540 days). After this date, archived daily dumps will be stored in the Commission internal cold storage. Please note that this retention policy is subject to change and may be updated as necessary.

We are constantly monitoring the data quality of the database and running consistency checks. Some of these routines might affect the content of the database. We encourage you to check the Announcements to find out all the past and forthcoming measures we take in this regard.

In a free text field, providers of online platforms can provide information in their own words, for example to explain why the moderated content is illegal or to explain the facts and circumstances that led to the moderation decision(s).

For a full overview of the free text fields contained in the DSA Transparency Database schema, please consider the API documentation.

The DSA is a comprehensive set of new rules that regulate the responsibilities of digital services. Find out more about the DSA.

Please use the feedback form. To use the feedback form, you need to create an EU Login account.

The “Data download” page of the DSA Transparency Database contains all submitted statements of reasons organised into daily zip files. It is possible to download zip files containing the submissions of all online platforms, or to select the zip files containing the statements of reasons of each individual online platform. The files can be filtered through a dropdown menu in the top right corner. The files are provided in full and light versions. The full version contains all data fields of each statement of reasons (see the full database schema), whereas the light version does not contain free text attributes with a character limit higher than 2000 characters (i.e. illegal_content_explanation, incompatible_content_explanation or decision_facts). Light archive files also do not contain the territorial_scope attribute. Note that a data retention policy applies to the daily dumps file.

The daily dump files contain all the Statement of Reasons submitted by the platforms during a given day. The files are provided in a nested zip archive containing the chunks. Specifically, each .zip file contains several zip files. Each of the latter contains the csv files storing all the statement of reasons received on a given day from the selected platform(s).

For instance, the light version global dump for September 25th 2024 -named sor-global-2023-09-25-light.zip-, will contain several zip files named like sor-global-2023-09-25-light-00000.csv.zip. Each of the latter will contain several CSV chunks, with about 100’000 SoR in each, named sor-global-2023-09-25-light-00000-00000.csv.

To obtain a sample of submissions to the DSA Transparency Database, you can use the .csv file download link available above the table displaying the results of a search for statements of reasons.

By default, the latest 1000 results will be available for download. To adapt the content of the sample, you can specify search parameters in the advanced search page. The first 1000 results from your advanced search will then be available for .csv file download.

The files are provided in the Comma-Separated Values (CSV) zipped format. Each file is accompanied by an SHA1 checksum file containing the original filename and its hash. The SHA1 file allows to verify the downloaded csv.zip file using standard tools. For instance, on a bash terminal, having both the csv.zip and the csv.zip.sha1 files in the working folder, doing sha1sum -c sor-global-2023-09-25-full.csv.zip.sha1 should show OK if the sor-global-2023-09-25-full.csv.zip file has been correctly downloaded.

To extract visualisations directly from the dashboard in a .jpg format, click on the “More options” menu on the top right corner of the dashboard visualisation you want to extract. Then, click on “Copy visual as image.” When your visual is ready, you can paste your image to your desired destination, using “Ctrl + V” or right-click and select Paste.

In the dashboard, you can export the underlying data of each visualisation into a .csv or excel file. The data in those files are the aggregate statistics based on which specific visual is built.

The DSA Transparency Database only records statement of reasons. These contain information on the content moderation decision itself as well as the information accompanying such decisions, with the exception of personal data, which providers of online platforms are required to remove before submission. The DSA Transparency Database does not contain the content that was subject to moderation.

For researchers interested in gaining access to the content underlying certain statements of reasons, the data access mechanism specified in Article 40 of the DSA can provide a way to obtain such access in the future.

Once the Digital Service Coordinators are established by 17 February 2024, data access requests can be submitted either to the Digital Service Coordinator of a researcher’s Member State or to the Digital Service Coordinator(s) where the provider of the online platform(s) in question is established. The Commission is currently drafting a Delegated Act that will lay down technical and procedural requirements of the Article 40 data access mechanism.

To set up your statement of reasons submission process, please register here regarding your obligations under article 24(5) of the DSA. At a later stage the Digital Service Coordinator of your Member State will contact with details on how to onboard your online platform.

Once you are onboarded via your Digital Service Coordinator, you will gain access to a sandbox environment to test your submissions to the DSA Transparency Database, which you can perform either via an Application Programming Interface ( API) or a webform, according to the volume of your data and technical needs.

Once the testing phase is completed, you will be able to move to the production environment of the DSA Transparency Database, where you can start submitting your statement of reasons via an API or a webform.

Statements of reasons can be submitted either via an API or a webform. For more information about the API, please consider the API documentation. The data schema of the web form is the same as the data schema of the API.

All attributes, which are part of a statement of reasons submission to the DSA Transparency Database, are detailed in the API documentation. The data schema of the web form is the same as the data schema of the API.

The DSA Transparency database has two API endpoints, one which allows to submit one statement of reasons per call and one which allows to submit from 1 to 100 statements of reasons per call. For more information on the API endpoints, please read the API documentation.

For high-volume submissions of multiple statements of reasons per minute, we recommend using the batch API endpoint.

For detailed information on possible error codes, please read the relevant section in the API documentation.