The Appeals Centre’s first Transparency Report (covering November 2024 to August 2025) highlights the urgent need for independent review of social media decisions. The report shows that where platforms make mistakes, people pay the price: from unjust account suspensions cutting people off from family and friends, to vital health information being removed, or hate speech against vulnerable communities being left online.
More than three-quarters of our decisions overturned Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube – either because we disagreed with their decision after reviewing the content, or because the platform did not send us the content and we ruled in the user’s favour. The majority of these decisions promoted freedom of expression by recommending that a user’s content or account be restored.
Across the EU people are standing up to social media companies by challenging their decisions:
- We received nearly 10,000 disputes about decisions by Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok and YouTube.
- These came from every single EU country, covering content in more than 50 languages.
- Of these, more than 3,300 disputes were within our scope, for which we have already issued 1,500+ decisions, with the rest expected in the coming weeks.
- Since November we have expanded to account suspensions and new platforms (Instagram, Threads, Pinterest) to allow more people to use our service.
- We received the most eligible disputes from Poland, followed by France and Italy.
- We saw an upwards trend in case numbers, with the number of eligible disputes received increasing by more than 500% from December 2024 to August 2025.
Under EU law (the Digital Services Act), social media platforms must engage in good faith with dispute settlement bodies like the Appeals Centre and tell their users about this new option.
- Today, however, dispute settlement bodies are Europe’s best-kept-secret. Most people don’t know we exist and some platforms seemingly want to keep it that way. This needs to change. Social media platforms should clearly tell their users about this new option on a dedicated help-page and as part of their internal appeals process.
- More generally, co-operation with platforms has been mixed. Progress with YouTube, in particular, has been very slow. We have received no content from the company, meaning that – by the end of August – we had made decisions on just 29 of the more than 340 eligible YouTube disputes submitted to us. As such, we are concerned that people and organisations using YouTube in the EU are being denied meaningful access to out-of-court dispute settlement.
The CEO of Appeals Centre Europe, Thomas Hughes, said:
“Decisions by social media companies have very real consequences: from denying people a say in important debates, to cutting off a crucial source of income. But – as our Transparency Report shows – they don’t always get it right. If you’re in the EU, you can challenge the platform’s decision free-of-charge to the Appeals Centre and get an expert, impartial review.”
