Navigating the EU’s Digital Services Act with AI-Based Moderation Platforms

The Digital Services Act: what does it mean for your business?

The DSA is about ensuring safer digital spaces. It places significant responsibilities on companies to manage the content hosted on their platforms. If you’re running a community-driven platform, the DSA requires you to remove illegal content quickly and keep users informed about why their content was flagged or removed.

But the DSA is more than just about removing harmful content—it’s about transparency and accountability. The law requires businesses to be open about their moderation policies, giving users the right to appeal decisions. Plus, companies with over 45 million users in the EU, known as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), face stricter demands like regular risk assessments and algorithmic transparency. And here’s the kicker: fines for non-compliance can go up to 6% of your company’s annual global revenue.

Challenges for Businesses Managing Online Communities

As if managing online content wasn’t already tough enough, the DSA adds layers of complexity:

1. Scale of Moderation: Platforms, especially larger ones, face the challenge of moderating vast amounts of content. With millions of posts every day, keeping up with the DSA’s rapid response requirements can feel overwhelming.

2. Transparency Requirements: The law mandates transparency in content moderation decisions. Businesses must not only remove harmful content, but also need to be able to explain to users why their content was flagged, plus provide ways for users to appeal these decisions.

3. User Empowerment: Under the DSA, users are given more rights, including the ability to challenge moderation decisions. This requires platforms to build robust appeals systems, further straining their moderation efforts.

4. Risk Management: Large platforms are required to perform regular risk assessments, a process that demands ongoing oversight and sophisticated content management systems.

These challenges aren’t new, but the DSA puts more emphasis on how platforms need to handle them. So how to deal with these requirements? This is where AI-based moderation tools like Lasso Moderation can play a role.

How AI Moderation Tools Can Help

Here’s where AI moderation steps in to make your life easier.

1. Automating Content Detection: AI tools excel at detecting harmful content such as hate speech and explicit material. With advanced machine learning models, AI can scan, flag, and remove illegal content in real time—ensuring compliance with the DSA’s immediate takedown obligations.

Real-Time Monitoring: Platforms like YouTube, which deals with over 500 hours of content uploaded per minute, have turned to AI to help moderate this influx. By automating the detection process, companies can maintain a safer space without compromising speed.

2. Consistency and Accuracy in Moderation: Unlike human moderators, who can have different interpretations of content, AI systems apply uniform guidelines. This consistency is critical in meeting the DSA’s transparency requirements and reduces the risk of legal disputes over moderation decisions.

Algorithmic Fairness: AI platforms ensure that content is moderated without human bias, applying the same standards across the board. For instance, platforms like Twitter/X use AI to filter hate speech uniformly across different regions and languages, keeping operations consistent and transparent.

3. Handling Scale with Ease: As your community grows, so does the amount of content to moderate. AI-based moderation platforms can scale effortlessly. Whether your platform has 1,000 or 10 million users, AI tools can process this content.

Efficient Scaling: Take the case of Facebook, which manages billions of posts each month. By leveraging AI, they’ve automated 95% of the hate speech takedowns, allowing their human moderators to focus on more complex cases.

4. Detailed Reporting and Transparency: AI tools also make it easier to comply with the DSA’s requirement for transparent reporting. Automated systems can track every moderation action, providing audit trails and generating reports that are easy to share with users and regulators.

Compliance Reporting: With AI, companies can automate the generation of reports showing how moderation decisions were made and how risks were assessed. This is crucial for demonstrating compliance with DSA regulations.

**5. Supporting User Appeals:**AI-based moderation platforms can also streamline the appeals process. Users who want to challenge a moderation decision can be guided through an automated process, ensuring quick responses without burdening your team.

Appeal Systems: Instagram has implemented AI-driven appeal systems to review user reports on content removal, making the process faster and more transparent.

6. Risk Assessments and Predictive Analysis: For large platforms, AI can assist in conducting regular risk assessments, as required by the DSA. AI can identify patterns of harmful content, assess emerging risks, and provide actionable insights.

Risk Mitigation: LinkedIn, for instance, uses AI to monitor content for signs of fraud or misinformation, helping the platform stay ahead of potential risks while maintaining a professional environment.

A Real-World Example

Consider Company X, an e-commerce platform with over 50 million users in the EU. Faced with the new DSA requirements, they implemented an AI-based moderation platform. This AI system flagged counterfeit products and fraudulent reviews in real time, enabling Company X to meet the DSA’s strict takedown timelines. Additionally, the company streamlined its user appeal system using automated tools, ensuring transparency and efficiency.

As a result, Company X not only complied with the DSA but also improved trust among its users and regulators. This shift toward AI-based moderation helped them avoid costly fines while providing a better user experience.

The Digital Services Act has raised the stakes for online platforms managing user-generated content. Businesses now need to handle content at scale, provide transparency, and protect user rights—all while staying compliant with strict regulations. AI-based moderation tools like Lasso Moderation offer a scalable, efficient, and reliable solution to these challenges.

By investing in AI moderation, companies can ensure compliance with the DSA, reduce their operational burdens, and create safer, more engaging online communities.

How Lasso Moderation Can Help