The Rules Glossary · User-Generated Platforms

2703(d) order: a US court order under the Stored Communications Act, issued on "specific and articulable facts," that compels non-content records such as login history and the participant list of a chat (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Access laws: US state laws that require age verification for all users and parental consent for minors' accounts, most of them challenged in court by NetChoice and CCIA (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Action plan: the remedy a DSA fine comes with, a project with deadlines measured in working days and periodic penalties behind it, such as the plans the Commission required from X, Temu and AliExpress (Regulators & Enforcement).
Actor type: who made a moderation decision (volunteer, staff, or automation acting for either), recorded on the decision so a report can show who moderates the platform (Transparency Reporting).
Ad repository (Article 39): the searchable repository of ads shown, who paid and whom they targeted, which very large platforms must keep under the DSA and which was one of the three grounds for X's fine (Regulators & Enforcement).
Addictive feed: California SB 976's term for a personalized feed that requires parental consent for minors, a provision partly in effect as of October 2026 (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age assurance: the methods a platform uses to establish a user's age (self-declaration, platform signals, inference, facial estimation, document checks), picked per feature and layered so the strongest check goes to the contested cases (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age assurance funnel: users prompted to verify their age, those who completed, those who passed, and the method used, which Discord publishes monthly and which every age check row makes a group-by (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age band: the cached band on the account (accounts.age_band, from under 13 upward), derived lowest-wins from current age signals and re-evaluated at each sensitive action, with unknown treated as youngest (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age check: one attempt to establish a user's age, from prompt to result, recorded whether or not the user finishes, with its method, vendor reference and the time its evidence was deleted (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age inference: placing a user's age from signals such as tenure, device and activity data, which lets a platform verify only the people it can't already place (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age restriction (account): a record that an account is below a minimum age or limited by age in a jurisdiction; it isn't a penalty, doesn't count toward standing, and ends on proof of age or a birthday (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age-Appropriate Design Code (California AB 2273): California's design code for minors, whose coverage, age estimation and data-use provisions the Ninth Circuit let proceed in March 2026 while its dark patterns provision stayed enjoined (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age-Restricted Material Codes: Australian industry codes registered by eSafety, three in effect from December 27, 2025 and six more, including social media and messaging features, from March 9, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Age-restricted social media platform: a platform eSafety treats as covered by Australia's under-16 minimum age, a list that includes Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit "among others" (Regulators & Enforcement).
Annotation: a recorded explanation of why a reported number moved (a policy change, new tooling, an error), stored with the period rather than written into prose at publication (Transparency Reporting).
App-store laws: US state laws that move the age check to Apple and Google rather than each app (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Appeals Centre Europe: an out-of-court dispute body certified in Ireland that received 24,000 disputes from April 2025 to March 2026 and disagreed with the platform in 59% of the decisions where it could review the content (Regulators & Enforcement).
Article 15 report: the DSA transparency report every intermediary service publishes at least yearly, covering authority orders, notices, own-initiative moderation, complaints and the accuracy of automated tools; micro and small enterprises are exempt unless designated very large (Transparency Reporting).
Article 16 notice: a notice of illegal content under the DSA's notice and action duty, which can come from a non-user through a web form as well as from a member, and which a platform counts by type and handling time (Regulators & Enforcement).
Article 24 report: the DSA additions for online platforms: out-of-court dispute counts and the share implemented, Article 23 suspensions, and average monthly active recipients in the EU at least every six months (Transparency Reporting).
Article 42 report: the six-monthly DSA report very large platforms publish, adding moderation staff and accuracy indicators per official language and recipients per member state (Transparency Reporting).
Average monthly active recipients: the count of EU users every online platform must publish at least every six months under DSA Article 24(2), and the number the Commission designates very large platforms from (Regulators & Enforcement).
Basic Online Safety Expectations: Australia's ministerial determination of what social media, messaging, gaming and other services should do; not enforceable on their own, but eSafety can compel reports on how a provider meets them (Regulators & Enforcement).
Basic subscriber information: name, address, session times, length and type of service, assigned IP address and means of payment, the least protected tier of the Stored Communications Act, compellable by subpoena (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Business disruption measures: court orders Ofcom can seek in the most serious cases that require payment providers or advertisers to withdraw, or internet service providers to block access in the UK (Regulators & Enforcement).
Categorisation register: Ofcom's list of categorised services, published July 10, 2026; Category 1 carries user empowerment, journalistic content and fraudulent advertising duties, Category 2A adds risk assessment record-keeping, and Categories 1, 2A and 2B all publish annual transparency reports (Regulators & Enforcement).
Civil subpoena: a private party's demand for records, which can reach non-content records but never content, because the Stored Communications Act has no civil discovery exception (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
CLOUD Act: the 2018 US law that requires providers to produce data in their control wherever it is stored, and that lets the US conclude executive agreements under which partners' authorities send orders directly to US providers (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
CLOUD Act executive agreement: a bilateral agreement, such as the US-UK (in force October 3, 2022) and US-Australia (January 31, 2024) agreements, under which a partner's authorities order data directly from US providers for serious crime (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Codes of practice (Online Safety Act): Ofcom's measures that count as compliance if followed; a provider may choose other measures but must show they work, and the codes are amended by statement (Regulators & Enforcement).
Coimisiún na Meán: Ireland's Digital Services Coordinator, the DSA regulator for providers established in Ireland, which certifies dispute bodies and awards trusted flagger status (Regulators & Enforcement).
Commitments: binding undertakings a platform makes to the Commission under the DSA, as AliExpress did on ad and recommender transparency and TikTok did on its ad repository (Regulators & Enforcement).
Contents: posts, comments, messages, chats, votes and uploaded files, the most protected Stored Communications Act tier, which in practice needs a warrant (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
COPPA age-check policy statement: the FTC's February 25, 2026 statement that it won't enforce COPPA against general or mixed audience operators that collect data solely to determine age, if they limit its use, retention and sharing and use a reasonably accurate method (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Default decision: a dispute body's ruling for the user because the platform didn't provide the content; Appeals Centre Europe issued more than 7,000, mostly about account suspensions (Regulators & Enforcement).
Defaults by age: the settings that change for minors (who can contact, who can find and see, what they see, what they can do, how they're kept), each with a regulatory anchor and stored as rule data (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Design laws: US state laws that limit "addictive" feeds, notifications and time of use, or impose age-appropriate design codes (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Design liability: claims that a feature's design (infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications), not the content, harmed a young user, as in the March 2026 Los Angeles verdict against Meta and YouTube (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Designated addressee: the establishment or legal representative a provider offering services in the EU must designate and register to receive e-evidence orders (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Designation: a regulator placing a service in a tier, such as the Commission naming a very large online platform; under the DSA the tier's duties apply four months after notification, so a designation is a product deadline (Regulators & Enforcement).
Digital Services Act (DSA): the EU regulation that stacks duties by tier (intermediary, hosting service, online platform, very large online platform or search engine) and lets regulators fine up to 6% of worldwide annual turnover (Regulators & Enforcement).
Digital Services Coordinator: the national DSA regulator in each member state, which enforces against everyone below the very large tier, certifies dispute bodies and awards trusted flagger status (Regulators & Enforcement).
DPIA (data protection impact assessment): the risk assessment the ICO found Imgur had never done, one of the three failures behind its £247,590 fine (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
E-Evidence Regulation: Regulation (EU) 2023/1543, applying from August 18, 2026, which lets a judicial authority send production and preservation orders directly to a provider's representative in another member state (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Emergency disclosure: a provider's discretionary disclosure of contents or records without process when it believes in good faith that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires it, the request type most targeted by fraud (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Enforcement ledger: a dated record of every regulator contact, request, finding, commitment and deadline with the people responsible, kept for the platform's own matters (Regulators & Enforcement).
eSafety Commissioner: Australia's online safety regulator under the Online Safety Act 2021, which administers the Basic Online Safety Expectations, industry codes and the social media minimum age (Regulators & Enforcement).
European Preservation Order: an e-evidence order to hold data for 60 days, extendable once by 30, and longer if a production request follows (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
European Production Order: an e-evidence order for subscriber, identifying, traffic or content data, answered within 10 days, or within eight hours in an emergency (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Facial age estimation: estimating age from a selfie, on the device in Discord's design, whose error is largest near the threshold, so a buffer zone around each age line goes to a stronger method (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Family supervision: opt-in, reversible guardian tools such as Discord's Family Center that show a teen's activity (friends, servers, who they messaged) but not message content (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Feature age rule: a dated row mapping a feature, jurisdiction and age band to a mode with parameters and a cited source, so an injunction is a new row rather than a deploy (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: the June 2025 Supreme Court decision that upheld Texas's age verification law for sites where more than one-third of the material is sexual material harmful to minors, applying intermediate scrutiny (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Geo restriction: a row that withholds an item, account, community, feature or the whole service in a country, checked at serving time against the viewer's location and answered with HTTP 451 and the legal basis (Regulators & Enforcement).
Geoblock: blocking a service or item for viewers in one country, a control a regulator expects the platform to prove works across account country, IP, every host name, embeds and APIs (Regulators & Enforcement).
Guardian link: a consented, reversible connection between a guardian and a teen account that records what the teen agreed to share and who can end it, kept separate from parental consent (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Harmonised templates: the CSV and XLSX templates fixed by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835 that DSA transparency reports must use from July 1, 2025, with quantitative and qualitative parts (Transparency Reporting).
HTTP 451 (Unavailable For Legal Reasons): the status code for content withheld by legal demand, whose body should explain the demand and whose Link header with rel="blocked-by" names the blocking entity (Regulators & Enforcement).
ICO (Information Commissioner's Office): the UK data protection regulator, which fined Imgur's owner over children's data and said that exiting the UK doesn't avoid responsibility (Regulators & Enforcement).
Independent audit (Article 37): the audit a very large platform must undergo at least once a year by an independent organization, with an implementation report within one month of an audit that isn't positive (Regulators & Enforcement).
KIDS Act (Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act): H.R. 7757, passed by the House on June 29, 2026, which would default platforms to their most protective settings for minors and preempt conflicting state laws, while saying outright that it imposes no duty of care (KOSA's core) (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Legal ground versus terms ground: whether a moderation action rested on the law or on the platform's own terms, a per-action column the DSA templates require (Transparency Reporting).
Legal representative (Article 13): the person a provider with no EU establishment must designate in a member state, whom authorities can address instead of the provider and who can be held liable (Regulators & Enforcement).
Legal request: one request for user data from an authority or private party, with its process type, verification, deadlines and status, plus the identifiers it named and exactly what was produced (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Minimum age: a legal floor on account holders, such as Australia's under-16 rule from December 10, 2025, which in engineering terms means finding existing underage accounts, restricting with an appeal, stopping new sign-ups and keeping evidence of reasonable steps (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Mutual legal assistance (MLAT): the treaty route in which a foreign government asks the US government, which obtains US process for the platform to answer (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
National security letter: a national security demand that, like a FISA order, sits on the same ladder and may be reported only in ranges, which is why Pinterest reports such requests as "0 to 249" (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Non-periodic notice: a one-off eSafety notice requiring a provider to report how it meets the Basic Online Safety Expectations on a topic; X was penalized A$650,000 for a response that didn't follow the specified manner and form (Regulators & Enforcement).
Nondisclosure order (2705(b)): a court order forbidding a provider to notify anyone of a request, for a period the court sets; a request that merely asks for confidentiality isn't one (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Notifier kind: who sent a report (a member, a non-user, a trusted flagger or an authority), recorded on the report so intake can set the priority lane and the Article 15 report can count trusted flaggers' notices (Regulators & Enforcement).
Ofcom: the UK regulator under the Online Safety Act, which sets codes, keeps the categorisation register, issues transparency notices and fines, and can seek business disruption measures (Regulators & Enforcement).
Online Safety Act (UK): the law that applies to user-to-user and search services with links to the UK wherever the provider is based, with fines up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (Regulators & Enforcement).
Out-of-court dispute settlement (Article 21): a DSA step between the internal appeal and a court, in which a certified body hears a user's dispute about a moderation decision within 90 days; decisions aren't binding, and the platform pays the fees if the user wins (Regulators & Enforcement).
Pen register and trap and trace order: a US order for ongoing collection of future non-content data such as IP logs and headers for a defined period, never content (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Periodic penalty payment: a DSA penalty of up to 5% of average daily income or turnover per day (Article 76), which stands behind each action plan's deadlines (Regulators & Enforcement).
Preliminary findings: the Commission's preliminary view that a platform breached the DSA, as against TikTok's addictive design in February 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Preservation request (2703(f)): a government request that obliges a provider to preserve existing records for 90 days, extendable by another 90, pending process; it copies what exists and discloses nothing (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Process type: the legal kind of a request (subpoena, 2703(d) order, warrant, pen register order, preservation, emergency, MLAT, CLOUD Act order, European order, civil subpoena), which decides the data categories that may be produced (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Production: exactly what left the platform for a request: the approved categories and date range, packaged with a SHA-256 manifest, approved and produced by two different people (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Reach band: Pinterest's measure of how many unique viewers saw content before it was deactivated, an exposure figure beside removal counts (Transparency Reporting).
Regime duty: a dated rule row recording what a regime (DSA, Online Safety Act, eSafety and others) requires of a service tier, with its source, so "what must this service do in this country today?" is a query (Regulators & Enforcement).
Regulator request: an information request, transparency notice or inquiry from a regulator, handled like legal process with an owner, a stored deadline and a record of exactly what was sent (Regulators & Enforcement).
Report actionability: the share of user reports that led to action, a statement about report quality (Reddit's was 6.9% in the second half of 2025) (Transparency Reporting).
Researcher data access (Article 40): the DSA duty on very large platforms to give vetted researchers data and not block access to publicly accessible data through their terms (Regulators & Enforcement).
Section 77 transparency report: the annual report each UK categorised service publishes with the information Ofcom specifies in a per-service transparency notice, so it isn't a fixed template (Transparency Reporting).
Social media minimum age: Australia's rule that, from December 10, 2025, age-restricted social media platforms take reasonable steps to keep under-16s from creating or keeping accounts, with court penalties up to 300,000 penalty units (A$109.2 million per eSafety) (Regulators & Enforcement).
Statement of reasons (Article 17): the DSA explanation a user receives for a moderation decision, including its legal ground and territorial scope, which is also submitted to the Transparency Database; the book stores it on the decision row (Regulators & Enforcement).
Stop Hiding Hate Act: New York's law requiring social media companies with more than $100 million in annual gross revenue to file their terms of service and moderation data with the Attorney General twice a year (Transparency Reporting).
Stored Communications Act (SCA): the US statute (18 U.S.C. 2701 to 2713) that governs what a public provider may disclose and what the government can compel, as a ladder from subscriber data to content (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Superseded report: a corrected transparency report published as a new row that replaces the old one while both stay public; a published value is never edited (Transparency Reporting).
Systemic risk assessment (Article 34): the very large platform duty to assess risks from the service and its design, including illegal content, fundamental rights, elections, minors and well-being, followed by mitigation under Article 35 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Teen-by-default: treating every user whose age is unknown as a teen and letting verified adults opt out, as Discord did globally from September 23, 2026, after delaying its March plan (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Transparency Database: the Commission's database that receives each statement of reasons a platform issues, a per-decision stream that should reconcile with the Article 15 counts (Transparency Reporting).
Transparency notice (UK): Ofcom's annual notice telling a categorised service what to publish in its transparency report; the first draft notices went out from November 25, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Transparency report: a platform's public account of its own moderation (removals, detection, appeals, child safety reports and government requests), voluntary for a decade and now also regulated in the EU, UK, Australia and New York (Transparency Reporting).
Transparency report value: one published number stored with its definition version, dimensions, unit and snapshot, so any figure can be traced to the query that produced it (Transparency Reporting).
Trusted flagger (Article 22): an entity a Digital Services Coordinator has recognized for expertise and accuracy, whose notices in its field must get priority; the platform syncs the Commission's list and reports flaggers who send poor notices (Regulators & Enforcement).
Unit of enforcement: what a report counts (a post, a distinct image, a Pin, an account, an action), the choice that makes transparency reports incomparable and that each report should state (Transparency Reporting).
User notice: telling a user their data was requested before production, the default at every platform surveyed, suppressed only by a court order, an emergency, child safety or a hijacked account, and scheduled for when a prohibition ends (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Verified adult: an account whose adult age has been established by a check, the status Discord's teen-by-default requires to unblur sensitive content, enter age-restricted spaces or (in its February 2026 announcement) speak on a Stage (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Very large online platform (VLOP): a platform with at least 45 million average monthly active recipients in the EU, designated by the Commission and supervised by it directly; Reddit was designated on August 31, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Voluntary disclosure (2702): the Stored Communications Act's general bar on a public provider divulging contents, and records to government, except under listed exceptions such as emergencies or user consent (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Withdrawal: leaving a market rather than complying, as Imgur did for the UK; past processing remains enforceable after the exit (Regulators & Enforcement).
Withholding: blocking one item in one country on a legal demand while keeping it up elsewhere, the narrowest of a platform's four geographic responses (Regulators & Enforcement).

2703(d) order: a US court order under the Stored Communications Act, issued on "specific and articulable facts," that compels non-content records such as login history and the participant list of a chat (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Access laws: US state laws that require age verification for all users and parental consent for minors' accounts, most of them challenged in court by NetChoice and CCIA (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Action plan: the remedy a DSA fine comes with, a project with deadlines measured in working days and periodic penalties behind it, such as the plans the Commission required from X, Temu and AliExpress (Regulators & Enforcement).
Actor type: who made a moderation decision (volunteer, staff, or automation acting for either), recorded on the decision so a report can show who moderates the platform (Transparency Reporting).
Ad repository (Article 39): the searchable repository of ads shown, who paid and whom they targeted, which very large platforms must keep under the DSA and which was one of the three grounds for X's fine (Regulators & Enforcement).
Addictive feed: California SB 976's term for a personalized feed that requires parental consent for minors, a provision partly in effect as of October 2026 (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age assurance: the methods a platform uses to establish a user's age (self-declaration, platform signals, inference, facial estimation, document checks), picked per feature and layered so the strongest check goes to the contested cases (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age assurance funnel: users prompted to verify their age, those who completed, those who passed, and the method used, which Discord publishes monthly and which every age check row makes a group-by (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age band: the cached band on the account (accounts.age_band, from under 13 upward), derived lowest-wins from current age signals and re-evaluated at each sensitive action, with unknown treated as youngest (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age check: one attempt to establish a user's age, from prompt to result, recorded whether or not the user finishes, with its method, vendor reference and the time its evidence was deleted (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age inference: placing a user's age from signals such as tenure, device and activity data, which lets a platform verify only the people it can't already place (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age restriction (account): a record that an account is below a minimum age or limited by age in a jurisdiction; it isn't a penalty, doesn't count toward standing, and ends on proof of age or a birthday (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age-Appropriate Design Code (California AB 2273): California's design code for minors, whose coverage, age estimation and data-use provisions the Ninth Circuit let proceed in March 2026 while its dark patterns provision stayed enjoined (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Age-Restricted Material Codes: Australian industry codes registered by eSafety, three in effect from December 27, 2025 and six more, including social media and messaging features, from March 9, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Age-restricted social media platform: a platform eSafety treats as covered by Australia's under-16 minimum age, a list that includes Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit "among others" (Regulators & Enforcement).
Annotation: a recorded explanation of why a reported number moved (a policy change, new tooling, an error), stored with the period rather than written into prose at publication (Transparency Reporting).
App-store laws: US state laws that move the age check to Apple and Google rather than each app (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Appeals Centre Europe: an out-of-court dispute body certified in Ireland that received 24,000 disputes from April 2025 to March 2026 and disagreed with the platform in 59% of the decisions where it could review the content (Regulators & Enforcement).
Article 15 report: the DSA transparency report every intermediary service publishes at least yearly, covering authority orders, notices, own-initiative moderation, complaints and the accuracy of automated tools; micro and small enterprises are exempt unless designated very large (Transparency Reporting).
Article 16 notice: a notice of illegal content under the DSA's notice and action duty, which can come from a non-user through a web form as well as from a member, and which a platform counts by type and handling time (Regulators & Enforcement).
Article 24 report: the DSA additions for online platforms: out-of-court dispute counts and the share implemented, Article 23 suspensions, and average monthly active recipients in the EU at least every six months (Transparency Reporting).
Article 42 report: the six-monthly DSA report very large platforms publish, adding moderation staff and accuracy indicators per official language and recipients per member state (Transparency Reporting).
Average monthly active recipients: the count of EU users every online platform must publish at least every six months under DSA Article 24(2), and the number the Commission designates very large platforms from (Regulators & Enforcement).
Basic Online Safety Expectations: Australia's ministerial determination of what social media, messaging, gaming and other services should do; not enforceable on their own, but eSafety can compel reports on how a provider meets them (Regulators & Enforcement).
Basic subscriber information: name, address, session times, length and type of service, assigned IP address and means of payment, the least protected tier of the Stored Communications Act, compellable by subpoena (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Business disruption measures: court orders Ofcom can seek in the most serious cases that require payment providers or advertisers to withdraw, or internet service providers to block access in the UK (Regulators & Enforcement).
Categorisation register: Ofcom's list of categorised services, published July 10, 2026; Category 1 carries user empowerment, journalistic content and fraudulent advertising duties, Category 2A adds risk assessment record-keeping, and Categories 1, 2A and 2B all publish annual transparency reports (Regulators & Enforcement).
Civil subpoena: a private party's demand for records, which can reach non-content records but never content, because the Stored Communications Act has no civil discovery exception (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
CLOUD Act: the 2018 US law that requires providers to produce data in their control wherever it is stored, and that lets the US conclude executive agreements under which partners' authorities send orders directly to US providers (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
CLOUD Act executive agreement: a bilateral agreement, such as the US-UK (in force October 3, 2022) and US-Australia (January 31, 2024) agreements, under which a partner's authorities order data directly from US providers for serious crime (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Codes of practice (Online Safety Act): Ofcom's measures that count as compliance if followed; a provider may choose other measures but must show they work, and the codes are amended by statement (Regulators & Enforcement).
Coimisiún na Meán: Ireland's Digital Services Coordinator, the DSA regulator for providers established in Ireland, which certifies dispute bodies and awards trusted flagger status (Regulators & Enforcement).
Commitments: binding undertakings a platform makes to the Commission under the DSA, as AliExpress did on ad and recommender transparency and TikTok did on its ad repository (Regulators & Enforcement).
Contents: posts, comments, messages, chats, votes and uploaded files, the most protected Stored Communications Act tier, which in practice needs a warrant (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
COPPA age-check policy statement: the FTC's February 25, 2026 statement that it won't enforce COPPA against general or mixed audience operators that collect data solely to determine age, if they limit its use, retention and sharing and use a reasonably accurate method (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Default decision: a dispute body's ruling for the user because the platform didn't provide the content; Appeals Centre Europe issued more than 7,000, mostly about account suspensions (Regulators & Enforcement).
Defaults by age: the settings that change for minors (who can contact, who can find and see, what they see, what they can do, how they're kept), each with a regulatory anchor and stored as rule data (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Design laws: US state laws that limit "addictive" feeds, notifications and time of use, or impose age-appropriate design codes (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Design liability: claims that a feature's design (infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications), not the content, harmed a young user, as in the March 2026 Los Angeles verdict against Meta and YouTube (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Designated addressee: the establishment or legal representative a provider offering services in the EU must designate and register to receive e-evidence orders (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Designation: a regulator placing a service in a tier, such as the Commission naming a very large online platform; under the DSA the tier's duties apply four months after notification, so a designation is a product deadline (Regulators & Enforcement).
Digital Services Act (DSA): the EU regulation that stacks duties by tier (intermediary, hosting service, online platform, very large online platform or search engine) and lets regulators fine up to 6% of worldwide annual turnover (Regulators & Enforcement).
Digital Services Coordinator: the national DSA regulator in each member state, which enforces against everyone below the very large tier, certifies dispute bodies and awards trusted flagger status (Regulators & Enforcement).
DPIA (data protection impact assessment): the risk assessment the ICO found Imgur had never done, one of the three failures behind its £247,590 fine (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
E-Evidence Regulation: Regulation (EU) 2023/1543, applying from August 18, 2026, which lets a judicial authority send production and preservation orders directly to a provider's representative in another member state (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Emergency disclosure: a provider's discretionary disclosure of contents or records without process when it believes in good faith that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires it, the request type most targeted by fraud (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Enforcement ledger: a dated record of every regulator contact, request, finding, commitment and deadline with the people responsible, kept for the platform's own matters (Regulators & Enforcement).
eSafety Commissioner: Australia's online safety regulator under the Online Safety Act 2021, which administers the Basic Online Safety Expectations, industry codes and the social media minimum age (Regulators & Enforcement).
European Preservation Order: an e-evidence order to hold data for 60 days, extendable once by 30, and longer if a production request follows (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
European Production Order: an e-evidence order for subscriber, identifying, traffic or content data, answered within 10 days, or within eight hours in an emergency (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Facial age estimation: estimating age from a selfie, on the device in Discord's design, whose error is largest near the threshold, so a buffer zone around each age line goes to a stronger method (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Family supervision: opt-in, reversible guardian tools such as Discord's Family Center that show a teen's activity (friends, servers, who they messaged) but not message content (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Feature age rule: a dated row mapping a feature, jurisdiction and age band to a mode with parameters and a cited source, so an injunction is a new row rather than a deploy (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: the June 2025 Supreme Court decision that upheld Texas's age verification law for sites where more than one-third of the material is sexual material harmful to minors, applying intermediate scrutiny (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Geo restriction: a row that withholds an item, account, community, feature or the whole service in a country, checked at serving time against the viewer's location and answered with HTTP 451 and the legal basis (Regulators & Enforcement).
Geoblock: blocking a service or item for viewers in one country, a control a regulator expects the platform to prove works across account country, IP, every host name, embeds and APIs (Regulators & Enforcement).
Guardian link: a consented, reversible connection between a guardian and a teen account that records what the teen agreed to share and who can end it, kept separate from parental consent (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Harmonised templates: the CSV and XLSX templates fixed by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835 that DSA transparency reports must use from July 1, 2025, with quantitative and qualitative parts (Transparency Reporting).
HTTP 451 (Unavailable For Legal Reasons): the status code for content withheld by legal demand, whose body should explain the demand and whose Link header with rel="blocked-by" names the blocking entity (Regulators & Enforcement).
ICO (Information Commissioner's Office): the UK data protection regulator, which fined Imgur's owner over children's data and said that exiting the UK doesn't avoid responsibility (Regulators & Enforcement).
Independent audit (Article 37): the audit a very large platform must undergo at least once a year by an independent organization, with an implementation report within one month of an audit that isn't positive (Regulators & Enforcement).
KIDS Act (Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act): H.R. 7757, passed by the House on June 29, 2026, which would default platforms to their most protective settings for minors and preempt conflicting state laws, while saying outright that it imposes no duty of care (KOSA's core) (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Legal ground versus terms ground: whether a moderation action rested on the law or on the platform's own terms, a per-action column the DSA templates require (Transparency Reporting).
Legal representative (Article 13): the person a provider with no EU establishment must designate in a member state, whom authorities can address instead of the provider and who can be held liable (Regulators & Enforcement).
Legal request: one request for user data from an authority or private party, with its process type, verification, deadlines and status, plus the identifiers it named and exactly what was produced (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Minimum age: a legal floor on account holders, such as Australia's under-16 rule from December 10, 2025, which in engineering terms means finding existing underage accounts, restricting with an appeal, stopping new sign-ups and keeping evidence of reasonable steps (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Mutual legal assistance (MLAT): the treaty route in which a foreign government asks the US government, which obtains US process for the platform to answer (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
National security letter: a national security demand that, like a FISA order, sits on the same ladder and may be reported only in ranges, which is why Pinterest reports such requests as "0 to 249" (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Non-periodic notice: a one-off eSafety notice requiring a provider to report how it meets the Basic Online Safety Expectations on a topic; X was penalized A$650,000 for a response that didn't follow the specified manner and form (Regulators & Enforcement).
Nondisclosure order (2705(b)): a court order forbidding a provider to notify anyone of a request, for a period the court sets; a request that merely asks for confidentiality isn't one (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Notifier kind: who sent a report (a member, a non-user, a trusted flagger or an authority), recorded on the report so intake can set the priority lane and the Article 15 report can count trusted flaggers' notices (Regulators & Enforcement).
Ofcom: the UK regulator under the Online Safety Act, which sets codes, keeps the categorisation register, issues transparency notices and fines, and can seek business disruption measures (Regulators & Enforcement).
Online Safety Act (UK): the law that applies to user-to-user and search services with links to the UK wherever the provider is based, with fines up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (Regulators & Enforcement).
Out-of-court dispute settlement (Article 21): a DSA step between the internal appeal and a court, in which a certified body hears a user's dispute about a moderation decision within 90 days; decisions aren't binding, and the platform pays the fees if the user wins (Regulators & Enforcement).
Pen register and trap and trace order: a US order for ongoing collection of future non-content data such as IP logs and headers for a defined period, never content (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Periodic penalty payment: a DSA penalty of up to 5% of average daily income or turnover per day (Article 76), which stands behind each action plan's deadlines (Regulators & Enforcement).
Preliminary findings: the Commission's preliminary view that a platform breached the DSA, as against TikTok's addictive design in February 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Preservation request (2703(f)): a government request that obliges a provider to preserve existing records for 90 days, extendable by another 90, pending process; it copies what exists and discloses nothing (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Process type: the legal kind of a request (subpoena, 2703(d) order, warrant, pen register order, preservation, emergency, MLAT, CLOUD Act order, European order, civil subpoena), which decides the data categories that may be produced (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Production: exactly what left the platform for a request: the approved categories and date range, packaged with a SHA-256 manifest, approved and produced by two different people (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Reach band: Pinterest's measure of how many unique viewers saw content before it was deactivated, an exposure figure beside removal counts (Transparency Reporting).
Regime duty: a dated rule row recording what a regime (DSA, Online Safety Act, eSafety and others) requires of a service tier, with its source, so "what must this service do in this country today?" is a query (Regulators & Enforcement).
Regulator request: an information request, transparency notice or inquiry from a regulator, handled like legal process with an owner, a stored deadline and a record of exactly what was sent (Regulators & Enforcement).
Report actionability: the share of user reports that led to action, a statement about report quality (Reddit's was 6.9% in the second half of 2025) (Transparency Reporting).
Researcher data access (Article 40): the DSA duty on very large platforms to give vetted researchers data and not block access to publicly accessible data through their terms (Regulators & Enforcement).
Section 77 transparency report: the annual report each UK categorised service publishes with the information Ofcom specifies in a per-service transparency notice, so it isn't a fixed template (Transparency Reporting).
Social media minimum age: Australia's rule that, from December 10, 2025, age-restricted social media platforms take reasonable steps to keep under-16s from creating or keeping accounts, with court penalties up to 300,000 penalty units (A$109.2 million per eSafety) (Regulators & Enforcement).
Statement of reasons (Article 17): the DSA explanation a user receives for a moderation decision, including its legal ground and territorial scope, which is also submitted to the Transparency Database; the book stores it on the decision row (Regulators & Enforcement).
Stop Hiding Hate Act: New York's law requiring social media companies with more than $100 million in annual gross revenue to file their terms of service and moderation data with the Attorney General twice a year (Transparency Reporting).
Stored Communications Act (SCA): the US statute (18 U.S.C. 2701 to 2713) that governs what a public provider may disclose and what the government can compel, as a ladder from subscriber data to content (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Superseded report: a corrected transparency report published as a new row that replaces the old one while both stay public; a published value is never edited (Transparency Reporting).
Systemic risk assessment (Article 34): the very large platform duty to assess risks from the service and its design, including illegal content, fundamental rights, elections, minors and well-being, followed by mitigation under Article 35 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Teen-by-default: treating every user whose age is unknown as a teen and letting verified adults opt out, as Discord did globally from September 23, 2026, after delaying its March plan (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Transparency Database: the Commission's database that receives each statement of reasons a platform issues, a per-decision stream that should reconcile with the Article 15 counts (Transparency Reporting).
Transparency notice (UK): Ofcom's annual notice telling a categorised service what to publish in its transparency report; the first draft notices went out from November 25, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Transparency report: a platform's public account of its own moderation (removals, detection, appeals, child safety reports and government requests), voluntary for a decade and now also regulated in the EU, UK, Australia and New York (Transparency Reporting).
Transparency report value: one published number stored with its definition version, dimensions, unit and snapshot, so any figure can be traced to the query that produced it (Transparency Reporting).
Trusted flagger (Article 22): an entity a Digital Services Coordinator has recognized for expertise and accuracy, whose notices in its field must get priority; the platform syncs the Commission's list and reports flaggers who send poor notices (Regulators & Enforcement).
Unit of enforcement: what a report counts (a post, a distinct image, a Pin, an account, an action), the choice that makes transparency reports incomparable and that each report should state (Transparency Reporting).
User notice: telling a user their data was requested before production, the default at every platform surveyed, suppressed only by a court order, an emergency, child safety or a hijacked account, and scheduled for when a prohibition ends (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Verified adult: an account whose adult age has been established by a check, the status Discord's teen-by-default requires to unblur sensitive content, enter age-restricted spaces or (in its February 2026 announcement) speak on a Stage (Minors, Age Assurance & US State Law).
Very large online platform (VLOP): a platform with at least 45 million average monthly active recipients in the EU, designated by the Commission and supervised by it directly; Reddit was designated on August 31, 2026 (Regulators & Enforcement).
Voluntary disclosure (2702): the Stored Communications Act's general bar on a public provider divulging contents, and records to government, except under listed exceptions such as emergencies or user consent (Law Enforcement Requests & User Data).
Withdrawal: leaving a market rather than complying, as Imgur did for the UK; past processing remains enforceable after the exit (Regulators & Enforcement).
Withholding: blocking one item in one country on a legal demand while keeping it up elsewhere, the narrowest of a platform's four geographic responses (Regulators & Enforcement).