The PIANO-supported article titled “The DSA Transparency Database: Auditing Self-Reported Moderation Actions by Social Media” has won an Impact Recognition Award at the the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW 2025), the top conference in Social Computing, held this year in Bergen, Norway.
In this work, Amaury Trujillo, Tiziano Fagni, and Stefano Cresci (Principal Investigator of PIANO) uncovered how well —or rather how badly— the largest social media platforms comply with Article 17 of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which obliges them to submit detailed data to a centralized Transparency Database on moderation actions they take within the European Union (EU). They found that: platforms followed only in part the database guidelines; the structure of the database is partially inadequate; platforms exhibited substantial differences in their moderation actions; a remarkable fraction of the database data is inconsistent; and X (Twitter) presents the most inconsistencies.
These findings have far-reaching implications for policymakers and scholars across diverse disciplines. In fact, upon invitation by the European Commission’s DSA Transparency team, last year this study was presented in an online workshop to mark the 1-year anniversary of the DSA Transparency Database.