Governing Visibility Under the Digital Services Act : Facebook Statement of Reasons Before and After the Commission’s Proceedings Against Meta

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines whether Facebook’s reported use of visibility restrictions changed after the European Commission opened legal proceedings against Meta on April 30, 2024, under the Digital Services Act (DSA). It begins from a simple but important premise: platforms govern public speech through visibility, discoverability, and reach, as well as through content removal. The analysis focuses on a single moderation output, the monthly share of Facebook Statements of Reasons resulting in visibility restrictions. The study uses a quantitative pre/post design based on monthly data from the DSA Transparency Database. The main comparison uses a balanced pre-period running from October 2023 through April 2024 and a post-period running from May 2024 through November 2024. The analysis is carried out at two levels: an aggregate monthly series and a pooled month-by-violation panel. That allows the thesis to examine Facebook’s moderation mix as a whole and capture differences across violation categories. The findings reveal a differentiated pattern. At the aggregate monthly level, Facebook’s visibility-restriction share fell from 0.4357 to 0.3348, a decline of 10.10 percentage points. In the violation-level panel, however, the post-period effect was positive and statistically significant once stable differences between categories were taken into account. The strongest upward movement appeared in “Negative effects on civic discourse or elections”. These results suggest that Facebook’s reported visibility governance changed differently across categories after the proceedings date. The thesis argues that platform governance under the DSA cannot be understood only by asking whether content was removed. It also requires attention to how visibility is redistributed across categories and forms of public speech.