Coimisiún na Meán, the regulatory body responsible for supervising and enforcing compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Ireland, announced in early May the decision to grant trusted flagger status to the Central Bank of Ireland. One month earlier, AGCOM, the Italian equivalent of Coimisiún na Meán, recognized the status of trusted flagger to S.O.S. Il Telefono Azzurro ETS Foundation. We have looked into these and several other decisions in EU Member States, published in the past year, to assess the commonalities that exist in the way the regulatory authorities (Digital Services Coordinators) examine and decide upon applications for recognition of the status of trusted flaggers.
The DSA, adopted in 2022, governs online intermediaries, including marketplaces, social networks, content-sharing platforms, and app stores. The primary objective of this EU regulation is to prevent illegal and harmful activities in the digital space and to combat the spread of disinformation.
Trusted flaggers are vital instruments in ensuring the effective implementation of these objectives. Pursuant to the DSA, providers of online platforms (a type of online intermediary) must give priority to trusted flaggers’ notices claiming that the content at issue is illegal or violates the terms of service of the platform. These notices must be processed and decided upon without undue delay. Digital Services Coordinators of the Member States are in charge of designating trusted flaggers at the national level.
Under Article 22 of the DSA, a Digital Service Coordinator may grant an entity the status of trusted flagger only if the applicant satisfies all of the following conditions:
- it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying, and notifying illegal content;
- it is independent from any provider of online platforms; and
- it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices diligently, accurately, and objectively.
This article describes how the Digital Service Coordinators have interpreted and applied the three criteria in practice. The presentation below is based on the Irish and Italian decisions referred to in the introductory paragraph, as well as on decisions by which the Digital Service Coordinators in Austria, Germany, and Italy granted the status of trusted flagger to the Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications (July 2024), Foundation for the Promotion of Youth in Baden-Württemberg (October 2024), and Argo Business Solutions S.r.L. (January 2025), respectively.
Expertise and Competence
To be designated as a trusted flagger, an entity must demonstrate prior experience in identifying and reporting illegal content. It follows from the reviewed decisions that this expertise must be directly related to the area for which the application is submitted.
In all reviewed decisions but one, the entities applying for the status of a trusted flagger have a track record of making numerous notifications to online platforms. Exceptionally, ARCOM, Italy’s Digital Service Coordinator granted trusted flagger status to the S.O.S Il Telefono Azzurro Ets Foundation, despite the absence of direct notifications to platforms. ARCOM recognised the Foundation’s consistent practice of promptly referring sensitive content to a specialized body within the State Police.
The decisions of the Digital Service Coordinators confirm that the competence requirement is satisfied through the engagement of qualified personnel capable of assessing the legality of online content. Accordingly, most of the reviewed decisions give due attention to the fact that applicants count on the contribution of legal experts. For example, at the time of the decision, the reporting office in the Foundation for the Promotion of Youth in Baden-Württemberg employed five permanent staff and 12 legal professionals on a fee basis, who were specially trained in the detection and reporting of illegal content. In the Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications, seven of the 23 employees had legal training. Only the decision of the Irish regulator is silent on the issue of legal training of the reporting team within the applicant, the Central Bank of Ireland. The presence of legally qualified personnel can be inferred from the Bank’s decade-long experience in identifying suspected unlawful content in financial services.
The decisions in Italy, Germany, and Austria also put an emphasis on the fact that the applicant entities ensured continuous professional development of their personnel, maintained through internal training or cooperation with external institutions.
Independence
As helpfully explained in AGCOM’s S.O.S. Il Telefono Azzurro decision, the condition of independence serves to ensure that reporting decisions are “not reasonably subject to influence by online platform providers, neither with respect to the possible emergence of conflicts of interest nor with respect to the presence of financial conditioning”. This condition encompasses both organisational and financial independence.
In all five decisions, the digital service coordinators were satisfied that the applicants had demonstrated financial independence from online platform providers and the absence of conflicts of interest within the entity’s organizational structure.
The decision of the Austrian Digital Services Coordinator concerning the Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications shows that there is room for flexibility in relation to the above criteria. The Institute received in 2023 one-time payments from two online platforms, within the framework of two specific initiatives. In return, the Institute agreed to involve representatives of the platforms in the advisory board meetings of the two initiatives and display the logos of the platform on the website and in some publications or workshop presentations; also, the agreements with the platforms provided for regular exchanges on ongoing topics. However, the payment from one platform accounted for less than 1.5% of the applicant’s total revenues, and the payment from the other platform – for less than 1% of the total revenues. Due to the low proportion of funding from online platform providers, as well as the fact that the agreements do not contain any conditions that would impair the applicant’s independence, the Institute met the independence test.
In the majority of decisions examined, Digital Service Coordinators have given favorable consideration to the fact that applicants have established codes of ethics or equivalent internal policies, or other forms of internal controls and audit mechanisms, as instruments to safeguard and reinforce their independence.
Diligence, Accuracy, and Objectivity
Finally, the reviewed decisions indicate that to qualify for trusted flagger status, an entity must establish clear and structured procedures for detecting, assessing, and reporting illegal content, thereby ensuring consistency and accuracy in its operations.
As the German Digital Service Coordinator explained, it can be assumed that an organisation meets this condition if it fulfils the requirements of expertise and competence.
In practice, diligence, accuracy, and objectivity imply that the entity has the ability to assess the substance of the potentially notifiable occurrences on the online platform. Hence, in the reviewed decisions, trusted flaggers had access to appropriate software tools, qualified personnel, and quality control mechanisms to guarantee the efficiency and reliability of their reporting systems. As a partial exception, S.O.S Il Telefono Azzurro Ets was granted trusted flagger status in April this year despite the absence of a formal content assessment procedure. AGCOM noted that the Foundation was developing such a system to comply with the condition set forth by the DSA.
Conclusion
The concept of trusted flaggers under the DSA represents a crucial mechanism for ensuring prompt and reliable identification of illegal content online. Entities seeking this status must demonstrate a high level of expertise, independence, and operational diligence. Notwithstanding the alignment of conditions across the EU, their interpretation by the DSCs of Member States allows for some flexibility. With the more frequent application of the DSA, trusted flaggers will remain pivotal in safeguarding the integrity of the digital environment.
* Fourth-year law student at the Belgrade University School of Law, intern at BDK Advokati.
