The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a much awaited platforms liability reform in the European Union that was adopted on 1 November 2022 with the ambition to set a global example in terms of accountability and transparency. Among other obligations, the DSA emphasizes the need for online platforms to report on their content moderation decisions (`statements of reasons' - SoRs), which is a novel transparency mechanism we refer to as automated transparency in this study. SoRs are currently made available in the DSA Transparency Database, launched by the European Commission in September 2023. The DSA Transparency Database marks a historical achievement in platform governance, and allows investigations about the actual transparency gains, both at structure level as well as at the level of platform compliance. This study aims to understand whether the Transparency Database helps the DSA to live up to its transparency promises. We use legal and empirical arguments to show that while there are some transparency gains, compliance remains problematic, as the current database structure allows for a lot of discretion from platforms in terms of transparency practices. In our empirical study, we analyze a representative sample of the Transparency Database (131m SoRs) submitted in November 2023, to characterise and evaluate platform content moderation practices.

翻译：《数字服务法》（DSA）是欧盟备受期待的平台责任改革法案，于2022年11月1日通过，旨在以问责制与透明度树立全球典范。除其他义务外，DSA特别强调在线平台需报告其内容审核决策（"理由陈述"，SoRs），这一新型透明度机制在本研究中被称为自动化透明度。2023年9月，欧盟委员会正式启用DSA透明度数据库，作为SoRs的初始发布平台。该数据库标志着平台治理的历史性成就，允许从结构层面及平台合规层面研究实际透明度增益。本研究旨在探讨透明度数据库是否有助于实现DSA的透明度承诺。我们通过法律与实证论证表明：尽管存在一定的透明度提升，但合规问题依然严峻——当前数据库结构为平台的透明度实践留出了过多自由裁量空间。在实证研究中，我们分析了2023年11月提交的DSA透明度数据库代表性样本（1.31亿条SoRs），以刻画并评估平台内容审核实践。