Today, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI) are releasing a high-level summary of key themes, learnings, and recommendations from the “2025 European Rights & Risks: Stakeholder Engagement Forum,” held in Brussels on 3 and 4 June. While in Brussels, GNI and DTSP also held a pre-event with regulators prior to the Forum on ‘Centring Human Rights in Online Risk Regulation’.
Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) in the European Union are currently undertaking their annual round of systemic risk assessments under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). Due to be submitted to the European Commission in August 2025 and published in November, these assessments are intended to identify risks arising from platform services, the mitigations that have been put in place to reduce those risks, and the outcomes of external audits.
This year’s Forum convened more than 75 participants, including representatives from eight service providers who are members of GNI and DTSP, and collectively manage 14 designated VLOPs or VLOSEs. The event also brought together civil society and academic experts from across Europe and beyond to reflect on risk assessment practices, the evolving DSA regulatory landscape and ensuring proportionality of government action.
Over two days of plenary panels and break-out workshops, participants explored several priority themes, including:
- Embedding human rights-based approaches in risk assessment and mitigation;
- Centering product design and platform function in assessing risks;
- Better integrating civil society input, especially on proportionality and impacts;
- Using data and metrics to evaluate effectiveness and support continuous learning;
- Addressing persistent challenges in meaningful stakeholder engagement;
- Clarifying the role of DSA audits;
- Strengthening coherence across risk-based regulatory frameworks.
The Forum offered a timely opportunity to take stock of lessons from the first round of published risk assessments and to anticipate future opportunities for strengthening rights-respecting regulatory implementation. Participants discussed persistent gaps in transparency, definitional clarity, and cross-platform accountability and discussed promising practices that can support better mitigation design and stakeholder engagement in the future.
If you are interested in engaging further on this work, please reach out to us at info@globalnetworkinitiative.org and contact@dtspartnership.org.