The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) is built on years of conversations and experimentation around how best to identify and control risks associated with digital content and services. The DSA recognises and seeks to support the steps that many platforms have taken voluntarily over the last 15 years, including expanded transparency reporting, robust content moderation, and increasingly mature approaches to human rights due diligence. Recognising the positive potential of these and other rights-enhancing mechanisms, the DSA seeks to ensure that they are applied more broadly, consistently, and effectively across the online ecosystem. This substantive continuity is reinforced by the DSA’s open architecture, which leaves room for, and in some cases explicitly encourages, opportunities for intermediaries, civil society, researchers, auditors, dispute resolution bodies, and others to engage with each other and with regulators to understand and improve digital services.
In the spirit of this openness, on 24 and 25 May 2023, the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership (DTSP) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI) invited our respective company members to join with a wide range of academic and civil society experts in conversation around the risk assessment provision of the DSA (Article 34). The conversations were conducted virtually and spread over two, 150 minute workshops, in order to maximise participation across key time zones.
The purpose of the workshops, supported by the BrainBox Institute, was to facilitate input from civil society experts about how companies can understand and undertake risk assessment and design risk mitigation as laid out under the DSA, as well as for civil society to hear questions, concerns, and ideas from companies.
For further details, please see the event Agenda and Reference Material below: