‘Mediated Transparency’: The Digital Services Act and the Legitimisation of Platform Power

Abstract

The EU Digital Services Act (2022) has established a new set of obligations for the digital media platform to build a safer and more trustworthy digital space. It creates one of the most up-to-date regulatory frameworks for content moderation in which transparency is focal in addressing the societal risks embedded in the design and functioning of platforms. The DSA is situated within the debates on constitutionalising platform power. This chapter offers a critical analysis of transparency measures in the context of platform content moderation and the DSA. Drawing on critical transparency studies, the chapter unravels the ambivalent nature of transparency and argues that transparency measures function more as a legitimising force for digital media platforms than as manoeuvres against the power structure of these platforms. It shows that transparency provisions are mostly framed as publicity (also as disclosure and understandability), procedural fairness and access to datasets, but they do not necessarily solve the problem of information asymmetry. The concern is that these measures may contribute to consolidating the power of major digital platforms and reinforce the EU model of technocratic legitimacy, thus raising questions as to whether these measures lead to wider public scrutiny or not.

Keywords: content moderation, Meta, knowledge asymmetry, access to datasets, recommender systems