The Digital Services Act is a European Union regulation adopted in 2022 that sets obligations for online intermediaries, hosting services, and platforms operating in the EU. It requires clear moderation policies, notice-and-action procedures for illegal content, complaint and redress mechanisms, transparency reporting, and — for the largest services — assessment and mitigation of systemic risks. It predates and sits alongside the EU AI Act and the Digital Markets Act, and is the instrument through which the European Commission has most often addressed algorithmic and AI-mediated harms.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 |
| Adopted | 2022 |
| Enforcer | European Commission (for VLOPs/VLOSEs), national Digital Services Coordinators |
| Maximum fine | Up to 6% of global annual turnover |
Scope and definitions
The DSA applies tiered obligations by service type, with the heaviest duties falling on very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) — services designated by the Commission on the basis of user reach. Designated services are subject to direct Commission supervision; other intermediaries are supervised by national Digital Services Coordinators.
Key provisions
- Notice-and-action. Services must provide mechanisms for reporting illegal content and act on notices.
- Complaint and redress. Users can appeal moderation decisions, including automated ones, through internal complaint-handling and out-of-court dispute settlement.
- Human oversight of automated moderation. The regulation requires human review of automated moderation decisions, particularly where legal content is removed under a service's own community standards — a requirement that directly constrains purely model-based moderation pipelines. See AI and Content Moderation.
- Transparency reporting. VLOPs must publish moderation statistics and disclose recommender-system parameters.
- Systemic-risk assessment and mitigation. VLOPs and VLOSEs must assess systemic risks to fundamental rights, civic discourse and electoral processes, publish mitigation measures, and submit to independent audit. See AI in Elections and Democratic Institutions.
Enforcement
A confirmed non-compliance decision can carry a fine of up to 6% of global annual turnover.
The Commission opened formal proceedings under the DSA against TikTok in 2024 over its handling of the Romanian elections, and against X over content moderation and advertising transparency. As of 2026 the DSA is the most active regulatory instrument applied to AI-in-elections questions globally, ahead of US federal action (see AI in Elections and Democratic Institutions).
On July 24, 2026, the Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok breached the DSA by failing to keep minors' accounts safe. The Commission found that users aged 13 to 15 could switch their accounts from private to public with little friction, and that accounts belonging to 16- and 17-year-olds remained visible to anyone online, including people without a TikTok login (Source: digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu; cnbc.com). See ByteDance / Doubao.
Relation to other EU instruments
The DSA governs the handling of content and systemic risk on platforms; the Digital Markets Act governs the conduct of designated gatekeepers in competition terms; and the EU AI Act governs AI systems and general-purpose models by risk tier. Under the AI Act, general-purpose models used in content moderation carry transparency obligations covering training data and capabilities, and high-risk content-moderation systems may face conformity assessment — obligations that layer onto, rather than replace, the DSA's process duties.
Relationships
- related: Digital Markets Act (EU), EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — parallel EU digital-regulation instruments.
- related: AI and Content Moderation, AI in Elections and Democratic Institutions — the domains in which the DSA's obligations bind most directly.
- regulated-by: applies to ByteDance / Doubao, Meta AI, xAI and other designated platforms.
- instance-of: EU vs. US AI Regulation: A Deep Comparison — the EU's process-and-transparency regulatory model.