The Appeals Centre’s second Transparency Report (covering April 2025 to March 2026) reveals clear flaws in how social media platforms apply their policies.
In 70% of the 1,400 cases where we reviewed platforms’ decisions to leave up content reported as hate speech, we overturned the platform. We were most likely to disagree with TikTok (overturning their decisions to leave up potential hate speech 83% of the time), followed by Instagram (74%), Facebook (61%) and YouTube (58%). These cases included hateful content targeting religious minorities, Roma people, migrants, and LGBTQI+ communities.
Across the EU people are standing up to social media companies by challenging their decisions:
· To date, we have received 30,000+ disputes from people and organisations in the EU.
· Of the 24,000 disputes we received from April 2025 to March 2026, 12,000+ were within our scope.
· We received nine times as many eligible disputes in March 2026 than in April 2025.
· We received the most eligible disputes from France, followed by Belgium and Italy.
· Between April 2025 and March 2026, we issued decisions on 10,000+ disputes:
o In the nearly 3,000 decisions where we were able to review the content, we disagreed with the platform 59% of the time (our overturn rate was 52% for decisions to remove content and 63% for decisions to leave up content).
· Examples of decisions where we disagreed with platforms included:
o Racist comments comparing Black footballers to monkeys which were left up on Instagram following a Champions League match.
o Antisemitic videos on YouTube that were shared by prominent figures in Poland and left up despite violating the platform’s hate speech policy.
o An AI-generated video about the Russia-Ukraine war which was left up despite breaking TikTok’s rules on misinformation.
o Pictures by a photographer from Czechia which were wrongly removed under Facebook’s rules on adult nudity and sexual activity.
o In 7,000+ decisions (mainly related to account suspensions), we did not receive the content from the platform and made a default decision in favour of the user.
Sharing Content for Account Suspension Disputes
· While most disputes we received from individual users were about account suspensions, we were least likely to receive the content from the platform in this area.
· Despite having received more than 5,000 eligible disputes from users looking to challenge account suspensions, by the end of March 2026 we had only made decisions after receiving the relevant content in fewer than 150 of these cases.
· For the remaining cases, we did not receive the content from the platform and made a default decision in the user’s favour.
· Social media platforms need to change this by sending us the content and allowing users to challenge account suspensions under the EU’s Digital Services Act.
The CEO of Appeals Centre Europe, Thomas Hughes, said:
“Online hate and harassment have real-world consequences for many people and communities. In more than two-thirds of our decisions about hate speech, we found that platforms failed to enforce their own policies and left up hateful content (including antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-Roma, homophobic and transphobic posts). This goes to show that platforms don’t always get it right. If you’re in the EU, you can challenge a platform’s decisions free-of-charge to Appeals Centre Europe and get an expert, impartial review”.
- Download the report (which includes data covering all 27 EU countries) through this link.