Transparency report

The Union’s regulation on digital services requires of every platform that shows user content a public view of its moderation. FACTOTUM is a small platform, yet we draw up this report all the same, because client and professional alike should know how often a review is removed, how often an account is blocked and how often a decision was changed after an appeal. The report is free, readable without an account and available in every language in which we work.

Six things are counted: the reports of users about content, the orders of authorities, the measures taken on our own initiative, the appeals against our decisions, the outcomes of those appeals and the cases brought before an out-of-court body. Every figure is broken down by ground — false review, fraud, abusive speech, forbidden offer, forged document — and by the language of the report. We also show how long we took on average, and how many cases a machine pre-sorted.

A report counts once, even if the same user sends it several times; if several people report the same thing, every report is counted but the measure only once. The time runs from the moment the report arrived to the first decision, always by the clock in Luxembourg. An account blocked more than once counts as often as it was blocked, but the number of accounts concerned is shown separately, so that nothing appears doubled. Numbers below five are shown as “fewer than five”, because otherwise a single case would be recognisable.

The report covers a calendar year and appears by the end of March of the following year on this page, as an overview and as a file to download. The earlier reports stay on the same page, so that one year can be compared with another; a report is never deleted and never altered in places after publication. If an error is found in a figure, a dated note is added below it and the old figure stays beside it. If you have a question about a figure, write to contact@factotum.lu and we explain how it came about.

An automatic aid sorts reports by urgency and spots repetitions, but it blocks no account and deletes no review on its own. Every measure touching an account or a public text is taken by a human being, and that human being also writes the reasoning. The report shows separately how many cases the machine pre-sorted, how many of them the human confirmed and in how many cases the human held the machine to be wrong. That last figure we give on purpose: it shows how well or badly the aid works.

The report contains only figures. No name, no address, no order number, no photograph and no piece of a message goes into it, nor any combination from which a particular client or professional could be read. Orders of authorities we name by kind and by country, but not by file where the law forbids it. If ongoing proceedings prevent us from saying something, that stands as a note in the report rather than falsifying a figure in places.

Every review, every profile and every message carries a button to report; you may also write to contact@factotum.lu. Each report receives an acknowledgement with a number, and a decision follows within seven days, faster in case of obvious danger. You may challenge within six months of the decision; another person looks at the case again and answers within fourteen days. If that does not satisfy you, the route to a certified out-of-court body, to the Médiateur de la consommation and to a court stays open.

The first period begins on the day the platform opened to the public and runs to the thirty-first of December of the same year. As long as that period is not closed, no summary stands here, for half a figure hides more than it shows. What is already accessible today: every user sees in the account the list of their own reports, the decisions on them and their reasoning, without having to ask. If an authority or a researcher requests a figure before publication, we give it where the law allows and state in the next summary that we gave it.