Signal USC Study Helped Shape Transparency Requirements for EU Social Media Moderation Law

Summary

Researchers at USC Viterbi and USC Stevens found a loophole in the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to report the accuracy of automated content moderation without clearly defining that term. That ambiguity could let platforms choose favorable metrics and overstate how effective their moderation systems really are. The team's recommendations fed into the European Commission's Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835. Platforms are now required under that regulation to report both precision and recall metrics for their automated moderation systems. US based platforms, including Meta and X, have begun complying with the new recall reporting requirement.