  The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a much awaited platforms liability reform
in the European Union that was adopted on 1 November 2022 with the ambition to
set a global example in terms of accountability and transparency. Among other
obligations, the DSA emphasizes the need for online platforms to report on
their content moderation decisions (`statements of reasons' - SoRs), which is a
novel transparency mechanism we refer to as automated transparency in this
study. SoRs are currently made available in the DSA Transparency Database,
launched by the European Commission in September 2023. The DSA Transparency
Database marks a historical achievement in platform governance, and allows
investigations about the actual transparency gains, both at structure level as
well as at the level of platform compliance. This study aims to understand
whether the Transparency Database helps the DSA to live up to its transparency
promises. We use legal and empirical arguments to show that while there are
some transparency gains, compliance remains problematic, as the current
database structure allows for a lot of discretion from platforms in terms of
transparency practices. In our empirical study, we analyze a representative
sample of the Transparency Database (131m SoRs) submitted in November 2023, to
characterise and evaluate platform content moderation practices.
