Why this transparency data only exists in the EU

Almost every number on this site — how many people use TikTok in Romania, how many ads Meta ran in Germany, how often a platform removed content and why — traces back to a single law: the European Union’s Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, or “DSA”). It is the reason this data exists at all. Take the DSA away and most of these figures simply would not be public anywhere in the world.

This isn’t a story about Europe being ahead on privacy. It’s narrower and more concrete than that: the DSA writes down, article by article, exactly what the largest platforms must disclose, on what schedule, in what format. We aggregate those mandated disclosures. Here is where each part comes from.

Who the law applies to

The heaviest obligations fall on Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) — services with at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU, roughly a tenth of the population (Art. 33). That threshold captures Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Google Search and a handful of others. These platforms are supervised directly by the European Commission, which can open proceedings and levy fines of up to 6% of global turnover.

The four disclosures we build on

Monthly active users — Art. 24(2)

Every online platform and search engine must publish, at least once every six months, the average monthly active recipients of its service in the EU (Art. 24(2)). This is the “AMAR” figure — the count behind our per-country reach numbers. Before the DSA, platforms disclosed EU user numbers rarely, inconsistently, and never on a fixed cadence. Now it is a legal obligation with a deadline.

Content-moderation transparency reports — Art. 15 and Art. 42

Under Art. 15, every intermediary service must publish an annual transparency report: how many removal orders and user notices it received, how much content it acted on of its own initiative, how many complaints it handled and how it resolved them. For the very largest platforms, Art. 42 tightens this to every six months and adds detail — the human resources behind moderation, the accuracy of automated tools, and figures broken down by EU Member State.

The public ad repository — Art. 39

Any VLOP or VLOSE that shows advertising must maintain a public, searchable ad repository, accessible through an API and kept for one year after an ad last ran (Art. 39). Each entry must show the ad itself, who paid for it, the period it ran, the main targeting parameters, and the total number of recipients reached in each Member State. This is the raw material behind the ad-transparency work on this site.

Data access for researchers — Art. 40

Finally, Art. 40 gives regulators and vetted researchers a legal route to platform data to study systemic risks — from disinformation to the protection of minors. It is the mechanism that lets independent analysts check the platforms’ own claims, rather than take them on trust.

Why the same numbers don’t exist elsewhere

The United States has no federal equivalent. Platforms there publish transparency data voluntarily, in formats they choose, on schedules they set — and they stop when it suits them. There is no legal AMAR figure, no mandated ad repository with per-region reach, no statutory researcher-access regime. That is why a chart of monthly users by US state, built to the same standard as our EU pages, cannot be drawn: the disclosures behind it were never required, so they were never made.

The DSA changed that for 450 million people. Everything you can measure on this site is measurable because a specific article obliged a specific platform to publish a specific number. When we cite “Art. 24(2)” or “Art. 39” next to a figure, that is not decoration — it is the source.

See how each platform is complying, or explore the numbers country by country.