Analysis - DSA Observatory

If at first you don’t succeed: Reflections on a rejected Art. 40 DSA data access request

March 12, 2026/in Analysis

By Catalina Goanta & Anda Iamnitchi

Article 40 of the Digital Services Act was hailed as a breakthrough for platform research. But what does the the procedure look like in practice? Drawing on their own rejected data access request, the authors reflect candidly on early lessons for the first wave of Article 40 applications, and what researchers should know before applying for access to platform data. Readers are also invited to contribute to an ongoing researcher survey and join a webinar on 20 March to unpack more lessons learned with DSA data access.

How Have Platforms Addressed Addictive Design Under DSA

March 9, 2026/in Analysis

By Cecilia Isola
SERICS (Security and Rights in Cyberspace); University of Genoa

This piece is part of a series with Tech Policy Press featuring articles adapted from selected papers presented at the second DSA and Platform Regulation Conference, an event marking two years since the Digital Services Act came into full effect.

Shareholder Control and the New Politics of Platform Regulation

March 6, 2026/in Analysis

By Paddy Leerssen
University of Amsterdam, Institute for Information Law

This piece is part of a series with Tech Policy Press featuring articles adapted from selected papers presented at the second DSA and Platform Regulation Conference, an event marking two years since the Digital Services Act came into full effect. The author delivered a keynote address at the conference; this article provides a shortened overview of those remarks.

How has the DSA performed in protecting election integrity?

March 4, 2026/in Analysis

By Luise Quaritsch, Jacques Delors Centre

This piece is part of a series with Tech Policy Press featuring articles adapted from selected papers presented at the second DSA and Platform Regulation Conference, an event marking two years since the Digital Services Act came into full effect. It examines how the DSA’s systemic risk framework has operated during recent European elections, and the transparency gaps that still complicate efforts to evaluate platforms’ mitigation measures.

Reclaiming the Algorithm: A call for social media interoperability

February 23, 2026/in Analysis

By Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon

This piece is the second in a two-part series on reforming recommender systems for the public good. It examines social media interoperability as an ambitious policy objective that could open the market to competing public-interest algorithms, and outlines regulatory pathways for achieving this— not only through the Digital Services Act (DSA), but also the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Fairness Act (DFA).

Who speaks and who is heard? Civil society participation and participatory justice in DSA systemic risk management

February 17, 2026/in Analysis

By Mateus Correia de Carvalho (PhD researcher, EUI) and Rachel Griffin (postdoctoral researcher, Duisburg-Essen University)

This post presents the report ‘Who speaks and who is heard?’ on civil society participation and participatory justice in DSA systemic risk management. In it, we examine the early practice of DSA participation to understand how it is unfolding in practice. Drawing on a qualitative empirical study with civil society actors of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and activities, we traced the mechanisms used by those actors, their perceptions about the usefulness of different spaces of participation, the strategic considerations determining when, where, whether, and how to participate, as well as the obstacles and inequalities hampering meaningful participation. Regarding these inequalities, we propose to understand them as a matter of participatory justice, making some recommendations to improve the overall inclusiveness of DSA participation in systemic risk management.

Reclaiming the Algorithm: What the DSA can—and can’t—fix about recommender systems

February 15, 2026/in Analysis

By Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon

This piece is the first in a two-part series on reforming recommender systems for democratic resilience and the public good. It examines how the DSA can be used to push platforms toward algorithms that better serve the public interest—through systemic-risk mitigation, design obligations, and enforcement—and what meaningful recommender-system interventions could look like in practice.

The Missing Metrics in DSA Content Moderation Transparency

January 8, 2026/in Analysis

By Max Davy, Oxford Internet Institute

The Digital Services Act makes platform transparency reporting mandatory and standardised, but the metrics it requires still fall short of what is needed for real accountability. Counts of removals and appeals alone cannot tell us whether content moderation systems are accurate, proportionate, or effective, making the absence of evaluation metrics such as precision and recall increasingly difficult to justify under the DSA’s risk-based logic. While these metrics are unlikely to surface in baseline transparency reports under Articles 15 and 24, the post argues they may yet emerge through heightened scrutiny of the largest online platforms and search engines (VLOPSEs), as regulatory expectations take shape through enforcement, systemic risk reporting, audits, and related obligations.

What are DSA audits doing for systemic risk enforcement? The case of X

December 19, 2025/in Analysis

By John Albert, DSA Observatory

Of the nineteen service providers initially designated as VLOPSEs under the DSA, X’s first compliance audit stands apart. Its auditor, FTI Consulting, broke from industry peers by offering relatively critical opinions — including findings that were unfavourable to the platform on obligations under active Commission investigation. How did X respond? Rather than work toward implementing the auditor’s recommendations, X simply reshuffled the deck: it went out and hired a new auditor (BDO). The move raises a deeper question about what the DSA audit regime is actually doing — and how seriously the Commission treats audits as part of systemic-risk enforcement, which, in principle, relies on auditors to provide an additional, independent layer of scrutiny.

Waiting for the DSA’s Big Enforcement Moment

November 26, 2025/in Analysis

By Magdalena Jóźwiak, DSA Observatory (University of Amsterdam) This blog post explores the issue of DSA enforcement by the European Commission, focusing on the law’s systemic risk management provisions. It first briefly sketches the Commission’s role in regulatory oversight of the systemic risk framework and then sums up enforcement efforts to date, considering also […]