A body set up to make Europe’s content censorship regime work has accidentally documented why it doesn’t.
Appeals Centre Europe, an Ireland-certified dispute settlement outfit operating under the EU’s Digital Services Act, released its second transparency report this week.
The numbers it published describe a system failing in both directions at once, and they hand the case against laws like the DSA to anyone who wants it.
Let’s start with what the body found when it actually got to look at the disputed content. Across the year from April 2025 to March 2026, it disagreed with the platform’s call 59 percent of the time.
Break that down and the picture gets stranger. When users challenged content that platforms had deleted, the Appeals Centre sided with the user 52 percent of the time.
When users flagged content that the platforms had chosen to leave online, the body overturned that decision 63 percent of the time. The same companies are deleting things they shouldn’t and keeping up things the regime says they should remove, often in the same reporting period.
The machinery the DSA built to produce correct moderation outcomes is producing roughly a coin flip. Legitimate posts get censored. The body reviewing the censorship then has to tell the platform to put them back. More than half the time, when it can see the evidence, it concludes the platform got it wrong.
The Appeals Centre received more than 24,000 disputes over the year, with eligible cases arriving nine times faster in March 2026 than in April 2025.
That is the scale of disagreement a single dispute body is fielding from across the EU. It is also a fraction of the moderation decisions these platforms make every day, which run to millions.
The DSA’s underlying premise is that platforms can review this firehose of human expression and arrive at defensible, appealable judgments about each piece. The error rate on the small sample anyone actually checks suggests the premise was never sound.
Then there is the question of whether any of it gets enforced and here the report stops being merely damning.
Account suspensions are where the system collapses outright. The Appeals Centre received more than 14,000 suspension disputes.
It managed to fully review fewer than 150 of them, because platforms would not hand over the content needed to assess the bans.
Hellbound and Down 