Transparency

What you will find below

In brief: a table of figures that fills itself from our moderation data.

Below this document is a block with the current figures. They come straight from the tables in which notices, decisions and complaints are recorded — the same tables the moderation screen reads from. There is no intermediate step in which someone retypes a number.

That is a deliberate choice and not a technical detail. A transparency report that someone fills in periodically is correct on the day of publication and no longer afterwards. Worse still: it sits beside a public log in which anyone can count the entries, so a report that falls behind is a report that can be caught out. On the page that is about honesty, that is the most costly thing that can happen.

What the figures mean

In brief: what is counted, and what is deliberately left out.

What is not counted. A decision that the moderator withdrew within the reversal window does not count. Such a decision reached no one: no message went out and no one saw anything change. Counting it would make the number of measures look higher than the number of measures anyone experienced. A decision that was reversed after a complaint was upheld does count — that one was genuinely taken, and the complaint that undid it is listed alongside as upheld.

The public moderation log

In brief: every removal of public content is listed separately, with a reason and without names.

If we remove public content, that decision appears in the public moderation log: the type of decision, the ground, the category and the moment. Never the name of the person who reported it, never the name of the person who posted it, and never the free text in which a person described the case — that can contain names.

The log and the figures above come from the same table. They therefore cannot diverge: if you count the entries in the log, you arrive at the number in the block.

Orders from authorities

In brief: never yet received. If one comes, it will be listed here — by hand, and we say so.

If we receive an order from a government or a court to remove content or to provide data, we include the number and the nature of it in the figures block below.

That figure currently reads "never yet received" and not zero, and that difference is deliberate. The other figures come from a table; for this one no table exists, because there has never yet been an order. A zero from a count that counts nothing would suggest a figure where a promise stands.

The procedure if one does come in, so that you can hold us to it: an order comes in via the contact point for authorities. It is recorded in our internal log of administrator actions, and the number and nature appear here at the next revision of this page — insofar as the law permits us to report on it. As long as that figure is kept by hand, it also states that it is done by hand.

Why we do this when we do not have to

In brief: transparency is Debaty's starting point, not an obligation we tick off.

As a small platform we are not required to produce the extensive transparency report that the Digital Services Act imposes on very large platforms. We do it anyway, and in the way that is least easy to tamper with: counted rather than written.

The reason is the same as with the rest of Debaty. Large platforms are a black box: you cannot see why something disappears, and not why you are shown something. With us, the timeline shows why you see something, every moderation decision is given a statement of reasons, and the moderation can be counted back. This page is the capstone of those three.

What else you can look into

In brief: transparency here is not a single page.

• The public moderation log — every decision separately.
• How Debaty makes money — where the money comes from and what that means for what you see.
• Where Debaty runs — every component, who manages it and under which law it falls.
• Your data passport — everything we hold about you, with your own figures.
• Sub-processor list — who else sees something of yours.

Version and changes

In brief: this is version 1.0 of this document, adopted on 23 July 2026.

• v1.0 — 23 July 2026. First adopted, complete version of this document.

Language and validity

In brief: the version you read is the one that applies to you — a translation included.

This document is available on Debaty in fourteen languages. The version in your language applies to you, and it binds us too. Where a translation differs from the Dutch text, the reading that is most favourable to you applies: we cannot hold our own translation error against you.

Dutch is the language in which we write changes and against which we check translations. That is a working arrangement inside our company, not a ranking between readers. If a translation lags behind the Dutch text, we say so at the top of the page, with both dates.

Wherever you live, the mandatory consumer law of your own country continues to apply, whatever else is written here.