If Meta removes your post or suspends your account, you do not have to accept the decision. Under the EU's Digital Services Act, you can first ask Meta to review its own ruling, and if you are still unsatisfied, take your case to an independent out-of-court dispute settlement (ODS) body. How does this right work and can users actually rely on it in practice?
Online platforms have long acted as judge, jury, and enforcer over the content they host, having full control over deciding what stays and what goes. For two decades, this went largely unchecked: the EU's rules for online platforms dated back to 2000, written for a much simpler internet, and gave regulators almost no tools to deal with the kinds of problems their scale has since created, such as disinformation, obscure moderation and addictive design.
In 2024, the European Union introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), a law that sets out updated rules for how online platforms must operate, particularly regarding the content they host and tackling potential harms to fundamental rights, civic discourse or election integrity. Under the DSA, platforms must be transparent about their moderation decisions and users must be given the possibility to challenge those decisions. Therefore, one of the rights that the DSA has introduced to users is the ability to appeal a platform’s moderation decision internally, directly to the platform itself. If a post is removed or an account is suspended, not only does the platform owe users an explanation, but users can also ask the platform to review the decision again.
However, the DSA also recognized that an internal appeal has the obvious limitation of the platform reviewing its own decision. To address this, in 2022 the DSA’s Article 21 was adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, introducing out-of-court dispute settlement (ODS) bodies. These are independent bodies that review a platform’s content moderation decision when a user remains dissatisfied after an internal appeal. Thus, rather than approaching a court, users can bring the case to one of these certified bodies, which examines the decision and issues a ruling.
To be certified, an ODS body must apply to the Digital Services Coordinator (DCS) of the EU country where it is based, and prove that it meets several conditions: independence and financial impartiality from both platforms and users, expertise in either illegal content or a specific platform’s terms and conditions, outcome-independent pay for its staff, easy online accessibility, and clear, publicly available procedures. Certification lasts up to five years, can be renewed and can be revoked if a body stops meeting these standards.
Once certified, a body can review disputes from users anywhere in the EU. Users bring their case after dissatisfaction with the platform’s internal appeal and the body subsequently examines the platform’s decision and reasoning to issue a verdict, usually within a 90-day window. The process is supposed to be low-cost or even free for users, with the platform covering the fees regardless of outcome. The body’s decision is non-binding, but the DSA sets out that platforms and users must engage ‘in good faith’. Furthermore, if we reported another person’s post, that person is not a party in the dispute. They are merely informed if the platform ends up restricting their content, in which case it must send a statement of reasons. The statement normally does not reveal who reported the post, since the DSA allows the notifier's identity to be disclosed only where strictly necessary, for example in intellectual property cases.
In practice, ODS has been available to users from mid-2024 onward, since national regulators have begun certifying the first bodies (such as Adroit and User Rights). Currently, eleven bodies are certified, each within a different scope of legal expertise, platforms, categories of content and language coverage. The European Commission keeps an updated list of all certified ODS bodies, where users can check their areas of expertise and languages as to choose an ODS body accordingly. Users may select any certified body regardless of which EU member state it is established in, as long as it is suited to their case and language.
ODS bodies for Croatian users
For Croatian citizens, choosing the suitable ODS body matters particularly as most certified ODS bodies do not operate in Croatian. Out of the eleven bodies certified thus far, only two currently offer their service fully in Croatian: ADR Center (certified by Italy’s AGCOM) and ADR Point (certified by Greece’s Hellenic Tele-communications and Post Commission). Both bodies encompass a broad scope of illegal content and terms-of-service disputes across most major platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and others. Both ADR Center and ADR Point require that the complainant be a resident of the EU and neither charges the user regardless of outcome. While these two bodies are the only ones that allow the entire procedure to be conducted in Croatian, through bodies such as Appeals Center Europe (ACE) users can file a case in English, but have the content of the disputed post be in Croatian.
It is worth noting that the process of filing a complaint with these ODS bodies is different from filing a complaint with HAKOM, Croatia’s national Digital Services Coordinator. HAKOM handles regulatory complaints about a platform’s general breaches of DSA, such as missing terms and conditions, lack of reporting mechanism, etc. A personal appeal on a moderation decision, however, requires Croatian users to use one of the mentioned ODS bodies.
ODS bodies’ transparency
As of now, only one certified ODS body, namely ACE, has published a country-by-country breakdown of its caseload. Its first Transparency Report, ranking all EU member states by the number of eligible disputes received, eligible disputes per capita and the rate of ACE overturning the platform’s decision after reviewing the content. ACE has published detailed statistics on the exact number, top platforms and top policy areas for the seven highest ranking countries (Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Lithuania and Ireland).
For the others – including Croatia, which ranked in the lower-middle: 20th of 27 for absolute number of eligible disputes, 12th of 27 for the number of eligible disputes per capita, and 19th of 20 for how often ACE overturned a platform's decision after reviewing the content – merely the rank position is available, rather than the exact numbers. The report does note that fact sheets for the other countries are ‘available upon request’.
The other bodies’ published transparency reports contain platform-level and policy-area statistics, but none currently publish a country-by-country breakdown the way ACE does. Furthermore, neither ADR Center nor ADR Point have published transparency reports, so there is no public figure on how many Croatian users have used those two services. In fact, the only data available on Croatian users of ODS bodies – a rank of 20th out of 27 EU member states according to the total number of eligible disputes – is published by ACE and merely reflects those willing and able to navigate the complaint process in English or another of ACE’s available languages.
While bodies such as User Rights and ACE do report on which kind of content is disputed (the largest shares pointing to bullying and harassment, hate speech and sexual content), they do not provide a country-by-country breakdown on these shares of content. Therefore, there is no way to know what Croatian citizens are disputing.
The current state of ODS reporting (particularly for Croatian citizens) falls well short of what would count as adequate transparency: disputes are reported in occasional transparency documents rather than through a live record, Croatia is reduced to a single rank position, with no visibility into which platforms or which types of content Croatian users are disputing and no data at all from the two bodies that actually operate in Croatian. Meaningful transparency would require a real-time, detailed reporting that is continuously updated and categorized by country, platform and case type, available in all relevant languages.
Furthermore, the data that is available is too fragmented and inaccessible. ODS reporting comes from individual bodies such as ACE, in English, with no Croatian version and no way to cross-reference data from other publications. Furthermore, oversight of the ODS bodies is not centralized at the EU level. Rather, each ODS body answers to the single national Digital Services Coordinator that certified it even though the body then operates and rules on cases across all 27 member states. For example, as ADR Center is certified by Italy’s AGCOM, the body is not held accountable to any Croatian authority that could monitor how these bodies are performing for the Croatian users that rely on them. Combined with the near-total absence of published figures on Croatian usage, this leaves Croatian citizens with no practical way to verify whether the bodies are functioning intendedly.
In line with its push for one clear public point of contact for DSA-rights, Gong argues Croatian citizens deserve better than this scattered picture of how ODS is working for them. Without an improved level of detail, accessibility and control over monitoring the right to out-of-court dispute settlements remains a right that exists on paper but cannot be scrutinized, verified, or acted upon by citizens, journalists, or civil society in Croatia.
Legal and practical ambiguity of ODS
Beyond the monitoring limitations resulting from fragmented reporting, Article 21 leaves several core legal questions unresolved. The DSA does not specify what standard of review an ODS body should apply – whether it should merely check that a platform followed its own terms and conditions, or independently re-assess whether the content itself was rightfully restricted as disinformation or falls under freedom of expression. While this ambiguity has been a topic of discussion, there has not yet been any formal agreement on standardization. Due to this lack of a broader template, the ODS landscape allows for the same type of dispute to be assessed differently, depending on which body hears it.
This ambiguity goes to the heart of whether ODS actually helps citizens in practice. ODS bodies are overturning platform decisions at relatively high rates, meaning citizens who do use it are, more often than not, vindicated. However, this vindication is still conditional: User Rights reports that implementation rates vary enormously by platform, reportedly nearing 90% for TikTok but remaining around 10% for Meta. This implies that the outcome of a dispute depends less on the merits of a user’s case, than on the platform they happen to be disputing. For Croatian citizens specifically, this uncertainty is again compounded by the near-total absence of country-specific data and the inadequate oversight over ODS bodies.
As long as a lack of transparency, lack of control over monitoring and lack of consistency across both bodies and platforms persists, ODS remains a right that exists formally but cannot fully be relied upon by users in practice.
