DSA CSO Tracker

Under the DSA’s co-regulatory model, Civil Society Organisations have an important structural role. They bring three capacities that EU, governments and platforms often lack:

  1. Watchdog legitimacy: representing users and affected communities, they supply democratic oversight that keeps enforcement from drifting into closed-door technocracy.

  2. Specialised expertise : from child-safety research labs to election-monitoring networks, CSOs translate lived experience into technical standards, ensuring risk-mitigation measures are grounded in real-world harms.

  3. Early-warning infrastructure : through independent audits, incident databases, and transparency dashboards, they detect emerging threats before regulators’ formal cycles can react.

Tracking CSO involvement is therefore critical to judging whether the DSA’s promise of multistakeholder governance is working in practice:

>Are marginalised voices reaching the rule-making table?

>Do platform risk assessments reflect civil-society evidence?

>And when gaps appear, who has the capacity to hold industry and regulators to account?

By mapping these dynamics in one place, the databases let researchers, policymakers, and the public see—not just assume—how civic expertise is influencing the future of platform governance.

The three DSA CSO Trackers below are designed to give a clear, data-driven window onto how CSOs engage with every phase of the Digital Services Act. Each tracker focuses on one systemic-risk domain—child online protection, electoral integrity, and minority & fundamental-rights—and documents:

• which CSOs were involved in the original legal texts,
• which are now influencing its interpretation through guidelines and soft-law, and
• which are building the audits, benchmarks, and public-reporting tools that surface new risks.

By tracing these threads in one place, the trackers shed light on the practical reality of DSA multistakeholderism: whose voices are present, whose are missing, and how CSO expertise continues to steer platform accountability. 

  1.  Child Online Protection _CSO Involvement

  2.  Electoral Integrity & Disinformation_ CSO Involvement

  3. Minority & Fundamental Rights _CSO Involvement

 Each Tracker contains three searchable tabs:

·         Regulatory Instrument ↔ CSO Link Map – shows which CSOs are cited or consulted in every hard- and soft-law acts linked to DSA.

·         CSO Systemic-Risk Toolbox – inventories the audits, benchmarks, and monitoring tools developed by CSOs to monitor implementation of the DSA and assess systemic risks.

·         Influential CSO Op-Eds – curates opinion pieces and open letters that re-frame the debate or spotlight emerging risks.