This week has shown, in the starkest possible terms, what happens when a platform's reporting and complaints systems don't work. In the wake of the Belfast riots, posts celebrating attacks on immigrants' homes were circulated on X, fuelling violence on the streets and leaving people too frightened to go to work. At the same time, Ofcom has a formal investigation open into X over its Grok AI chatbot being used to generate and share illegal sexual imagery, including child sexual abuse material.
These are not isolated occurrences. In fact, they are the product of a platform’s reporting and complaints processes not capturing harmful content before real damage is done, and of no independent process for users to contest that.
How Europe Handles It
Putting it simply, imagine if, every time a referee made a bad call, the only appeal available was asking that same referee to review their own decision. That's roughly how content moderation works on most platforms, and it's the gap the EU decided to close in 2024.
Under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act, EU users are able challenge a platform's decision through an independent body, entirely separate from the social media platform. Therefore, if a platform removes your post, suspends your account, or ignores something you've reported, you can take that decision to an independent body, one that's certified for this purpose and has no stake in keeping the platform or its stakeholders happy.
Appeals Centre Europe, one of these bodies, has ruled on around 1,500 cases. The platform lost about three in four of them, either because the original decision was wrong, or because the platform couldn't be bothered to hand over the content when asked to look again. But three in four does not pertain to infrequent errors. Rather, it reveals a pattern of behaviour that shows how platforms deal with complaints when they are unmonitored and unaccountable.
How we handle it
Lets say the UK equivalent is a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall with a sign reading ‘in case of emergency, someone will eventually decide whether to break the glass.’
Section 217 of the Online Safety Act gives the government the power to set up a body like Appeals Centre Europe here. But this is only put into effect once Ofcom publishes a report under Section 160, which is meant to assess how well platforms handle reports and complaints and recommend whether Section 217 should be used. However, that report is overdue.
So if your report about CSAM generated by Grok went nowhere, and some clearly have, given that Ofcom is now investigating X over exactly this, there's no one to take that to. Ofcom can open investigations against platforms for compliance failures, but not for individual instances of breaches on behalf of the public. You, the person who actually made the report, can't go after anyone at all.
What we want to do
We're writing to Ofcom and to the government asking where this report is and when can we expect it now that it’s overdue. We want to back that letter with evidence, explicit examples of reports that went nowhere, complaints that were ignored, or content that took far too long to come down. If you've had an experience like that, on X or elsewhere, we'd like to hear about it, because the more cases we can point to, the harder this is to brush under the mat.
Furthermore, we believe that the threat of the cost of dealing with all these complaints through an external body might almost force platforms to stop acting disgracefully.
We're also looking at the Online Safety Act's super-complaints mechanism, for which Ofcom only published final guidance in February. It allows organisations like ours to raise systemic failures, including broken reporting and complaints procedures, directly with the regulator, without waiting on Section 160. It's a newer route and untested, but it doesn't depend on anyone else's timeline.