New round of semi-annual reports for the main online platforms active in the territory of the European Union according to the requirements of the Digital Services Act, which obliges them to make public data on the number of users, content moderation and human staff employed for this purpose.
For everyone, this is the second report of its kind (here the data of the first), was published between March and April 2024 and generally refers to the last months of 2023, which also allows us to make a comparison and understand which ones have improved and where and which ones have possibly worsened. We have found the documents online, not without some difficulty of Alphabet, Meta, TikTok and Twitter and we describe them below.
Social networks One year later, Twitter is still Twitter. And maybe we can put a cross on X by Emanuele Capone 09 April 2024 The cover of the second DSA Report by TikTok
Active users: TikTok exceeds 20 million in Italy
Let’s start with the Mountain View company, which controls GoogleGmail, Maps, YouTube and others: for our country, 41.5 million monthly accesses to Maps are declared, 38.3 to the Play Store, almost 49 million to search and almost 54 million monthly active users for YouTube, a marked increase compared to the previous report. Overall, Google declares over 282 million active users every month in Europe on Maps, almost 295 million on the Play Store and almost 372 million in Search.
As for Meta, there are obviously two reports: for Facebook 260.7 million monthly active users are declared throughout the EU, of which 35.9 million in Italy; For Instagram, monthly active users across the EU are 264.3, of which 39.4 million in Italy. For our country, both figures are slightly growing: +100 thousand for Facebook and +400 thousand for Instagram.
TikTok declares 142 million monthly active users in the EU, of which almost 21 million in Italy, exceeding for the first time the threshold of 20 million (one third of the population, in short), while Twitter declares just under 109.2 million for the entire EU and 4.9 million for our country, a slight decrease compared to the 5 million declared last October.
Further information Why is TikTok so popular? 8 reasons to explain the success of Emanuele Capone’s social networks Coca-Cola 30 April 2024
Moderators in Italy, Twitter gets even worse
Another important data is that relating to who it deals with, together with automated and AI-based tools, content moderation. And in particular how many there are who understand the language of the country in which they operate.
For Italy, Alphabet declares 12 moderators for Maps, 16 for the Play Store and 229 for YouTube, growing significantly compared to 91 in the previous survey. Instead, slight decline for Meta: moderators who understand Italian are 164 in total for Facebook and Instagram, compared to 179 last autumn.
In the end, TikTok and Twitter, at two opposite poles of the ranking: the ByteDance platform confirms itself as the best from this point of view, with 439 moderators dedicated to Italy (+9), while Musk’s gets even worse, dropping from 2 to just 1 moderator for the Italian language.
All things considered, it’s about less than 850 people who understand our language to moderate the contents of approximately 140 million accounts: even considering inevitable overlaps, we continue to believe that this is an inadequate proportion, and that from this point of view the platforms should (and could) do much better. Some more than others, obviously.
@capoema