Keeping a standing record of what was decided and on whose authority

Definition · Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (2012)

Anyone subject to a decision must have a real route to challenge it — to inspect the grounds it was made on, to contest the outcome, and to have that challenge answered. Legitimacy is not settled once by an election or an act of consent; it is held open by that route staying available. The test of a free system is not that its rulers are kind, but that their decisions can be contested by the people they affect.

Analysis

One of Pettit's three requirements is met at real scale. With 353.12 million statements of reasons published in a hundred days, the grounds of individual decisions can be inspected by anyone who wants them. The other two are not supplied by this work: the audit trail's reader is an auditor rather than the person the decision fell on, and neither paper gives anybody a route to challenge or anybody a duty to answer. The redress route in the DSA comes from the statute, not from the audit of it.

Definition · Philip Pettit, Republicanism (1997)

Freedom here is not the absence of interference. You are unfree if someone holds unchecked power over you — even if they never misuse it and mean well. A benevolent master is still a master, and so is an authority whose workings you cannot see. Legitimacy requires that power be checked, not merely well-intentioned.

Analysis

Tamper-evidence and append-only storage are a check that does not rest on the operator's good intentions, which is the structural form Pettit insists on, and the DSA database adds statutory compulsion, since the eight largest platforms submit whether they wish to or not. The limit is who holds the check and what it reaches. The ledger is read by auditors, nothing in the paper makes it public, and the statements of reasons are self-reported by the party that made the decision, so the record is only ever as honest as the power it is meant to constrain.

Definition · Common-law practice

Rulings on challenges are written down, published and citable, so the system's interpretation of its own rules accumulates in the open, where it can be studied, invoked and criticized. The record is what makes the system predictable as well as legitimate: nothing is settled in private, and every decision leaves its reasoning behind it.

Analysis

This is the largest existing corpus of machine-readable decision records for automated content decisions: every individual application of the DSA emits a public statement of reasons, and the eight largest platforms filed 353.12 million of them in a hundred days. Two things the tradition requires are still absent. The entries are first-instance decisions rather than rulings on challenges, and each is the deciding platform's own account of why it acted, so nothing in the record has been tested against anyone and nothing in it can be invoked as authority for how the next case should go.

A common-law record is prose, and it is read one case at a time. You cannot ask it how much more readily one court restricted than another under the same rule, or how much of its work was done without a human. Because statements of reasons under the DSA are machine-readable and arrive in the hundreds of millions, this audit compares grounds, restriction type, timeliness and automation across eight bodies applying one rulebook. That is scrutiny of a kind the tradition has no way of performing.