Open Terms Archive June Community Call with Suzanne Vergnolle: tracking the DSA’s systemic risk reports

With its precious open-source tool, Open Terms Archive records every version of the terms of digital services, such as online platforms, digital marketplaces or social media, to enable democratic oversight.  

To get up to date information on the Open Terms Archive’s activities, the NGO conducts monthly community calls.  For its June’s community call, Suzanne Vergnolle was invited to discuss the Digital Services Act’s Systemic Risk Reports collection alongside Matti Schneider.  

Suzanne Vergnolle opened the exchange by making a brief presentation of the legal instrument mandating Systemic Risk Reports, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The regulation requires designated platforms and search engines to publish annual reports on systemic risks. This documentation aims at assessing the risks stemming from the design or functioning of their service and the effective measures put in place to mitigate those risks.  

After a first round of published reports, the Chair on Online Content Moderation organized “Hack the DSA”, an event to deep dive into that documentation to analyse their content and assess their compliance with the DSA. One team (with people from Open Terms Archive and CheckFirst) decided to focus on archiving systemic risks reports. Specifically, access to platform reports was found to be tedious and unreliable, as these documents are often published in unsuitable formats that are difficult to exploit or cannot be easily compared over time. During her presentation, Suzanne Vergnolle emphasized that having a trustworthy third party keeping this documentation is essential to ensure that the DSA keeps its transparency promise, and she supported the creation of the DSA systemic risk reports archive. Hosted by Open Terms Archive and regularly updated, this archive ensures the long preservation of DSA-mandated systemic risks reports. Thanks to this initiative, reports remain accessible over time, avoiding undisclosed changes or their suppression at the end of the retention period.  

Matti Schneider took the opportunity of the community to call for a deep dive into the functioning of the collection. Crucially, this collection provides some special features, as it permits access to the documents both in PDF format and in a raw text version, and to simply visualize the changes on a certain version of the reports. These features aim to facilitate text comparison and investigations.   

The community call was also a good opportunity to discuss the importance of the DSA in making platforms more responsible and to provide a brief update on software related developments from the Open Terms Archive core team. It also allowed a genuine discussion on the financial difficulties faced by NGOs promoting digital rights. 

To conclude, this community call was yet another example of the need for a strong and united civil society, notably for the DSA’s implementation. A lot of this regulation relies on a highly active civil society, which nevertheless is not provided with financial support. As put forward in her report on possible collaboration between the European Commission and civil society organizations, Suzanne Vergnolle reiterated the need to institutionalize this relationship and support this work with the supervisory fees paid by platforms and search engines.