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：《数字服务法案》（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，旨在以问责制和透明度树立全球典范。除其他义务外，DSA特别强调线上平台需报告其内容审核决定（"理由说明"——SoRs），这是本研究中所称"自动化透明"的新型透明度机制。目前，SoRs可通过欧盟委员会于2023年9月启动的DSA透明度数据库获取。该数据库标志着平台治理的历史性成就，允许对结构性透明度提升及平台合规层面的实际透明度增益展开研究。本研究旨在探究透明度数据库是否助力DSA兑现其透明度承诺。我们通过法律与实证论据表明，尽管透明度有所提升，但因现有数据库结构赋予平台在透明度实践方面较大自由裁量权，合规性问题依然存在。在实证研究中，我们分析了2023年11月提交的透明度数据库代表性样本（1.31亿条SoRs），以描述并评估平台内容审核实践。