The Commission has sent requests for information (RFI) to the providers of Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The EU Commission is requesting the providers of Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos to provide more information related to their transparency reporting obligations, as the Commission suspects they lack clear and easily comprehensible information on their content moderation practices. This covers information with respect to Court orders, notices, content moderation processes, the internal complaint-handling system, as well as the automated means relied on for the purpose of content moderation.
The platforms are also asked to provide information on the human resources dedicated to content moderation, including information about their qualifications and linguistic expertise as well as indicators of accuracy and related information of the automated means used for content moderation purposes, as required by the DSA.
Moreover, the Commission requests detailed information on the platforms’ public advertisements repositories, as the Commission suspects that these are not easily searchable and do not allow multicriteria queries and application programming interfaces (API) tools, as required under the DSA.
The providers of Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos must provide the requested information by 7 November 2024. Based on the assessment of the replies, the Commission will determine the next steps. This could entail the formal opening of proceedings pursuant to Article 66 of the DSA. Pursuant to Article 74 (2) of the DSA, the Commission can impose fines for incorrect, incomplete, or misleading information in response to a request for information. In case of failure to reply, the Commission may decide to request the information by decision. In this case, failure to reply by the deadline could lead to the imposition of periodic penalty payments.
This is the second set of RFIs the Commission sends to Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos. The first RFI focused on information related to protection of minors, including details on age assurance mechanisms, as well as the amplification of illegal content, gender-based violence and on the internal organisation of companies to ensure compliance.
Find further information:
- The Digital Services Act package
- DSA: Very large online platforms and search engines
- Supervision of the designated very large online platforms and search engines under DSA
- The enforcement framework under the Digital Services Act
Source – EU Commission