DSA’s new demands, US age checks upheld, and Roblox suspension research
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your need-to-know news and analysis about platform policy, content moderation and internet regulation. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
There’s no easing into summer for T&S teams. This week saw a host of new Digital Services Act updates, a landmark legal judgement to keep track of and a new regulatory consultation to get stuck into. And that was against the background of two companies laying off safety staff as part of wider reorganisations. You could say it's been one of those weeks.
Fear not though — especially new subscribers from Hive, Linklaters, Castle, Ofcom, Bodyguard, Ostia and elsehwhere — Mike Masnick is back on Ctrl-Alt-Speech to quell the panic over misinformation. Or at least try to.
Here's your Week in Review, sent from an unreasonably sunny London — BW
In case you missed it, an important DSA milestone quietly passed.
From July 1, 2025, all online services in the EU must use the new template for Transparency Reports issued by the 🇪🇺 Commission.
It will require strong cross-team effort - Trust & Safety, Compliance, and Engineering all need to be aligned.
That’s why Tremau built Nima, the T&S orchestration platform that automates DSA transparency reporting end-to-end.
And to break down the process, Tremau just crafted the 'DSA Transparency Report Operational Checklist', with all the key boxes to tick for the February 2026 deadline.
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
Just hours after last week’s age verification-focused Ctrl-Alt-Speech hit your feeds, the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of states’ rights to require sites to ask for a user‘s age. The 6-3 decision to uphold Texas Law HB 118 challenges decades of legal precedent by deciding that “the state’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content” outweighs other rights and concerns.
Naturally, it has been celebrated by child protection advocates and mourned by privacy and security experts. But just how consequential might it be? The Verge has a summary of the big unanswered questions, including, crucially, ‘What is porn?’ (no need to send me your answers to this question directly).