Eroding the Edge of Democracy: A Harm Index for Algorithmic Accountability

Section 5 - What the Test Cases Show About Audit Architectures

In Section 4, I tested three of the largest VLOPs against my Harm Index. The twelve indicators show that Meta and X fail across all three indices, placing them beyond the edge of democracy, dominating the space of reasons towards citizens and the state. YouTube achieved the most positive result, with a consistent score of 1 across all three indices. This places it at the edge: standing holds, but precariously, short of secure (2).

A macro-level examination of the 2025 audit reports across 21 VLOPs and 2 VLOSEs, published by KPMG (2026), correlates with my findings. The cohort has expanded from the initial 19 services as newly designated platforms completed their first audit cycle (KPMG, 2026, p. 4). Holding a dual role, KPMG is not a disinterested source. KPMG is a DSA auditor and a member of the European Contact Group, the industry coalition whose guidance on disclaiming obligations under Commission investigation is examined in Section 3 (Albert, 2025). Its analysis is used here as evidence from within the audit profession, not as independent confirmation. The two VLOSEs are included in KPMG's aggregate figures, but they account for 2 of the 23 reports analysed (KPMG, 2026, p. 31). The obligations examined are predominantly Chapter III platform obligations meaning that their inclusion does not distort the findings. The failures are not anomalies confined to Meta, X and YouTube; the audit profession's own cross-platform analysis shows them to be structural features of the wider cohort.

From KPMG, the headline figures in the 2026 cross-platform benchmark suggest a developing compliance. Overall, positive opinions rose to 79 percent, from 72 percent, while negative opinions fell to 6 percent (KPMG, 2026, p. 6). This aggregate finding does not survive when examined in detail. This is supported by KPMG’s finer analysis. Applying my Harm Index, in conjunction with KPMG’s analysis, the aggregate progress proves to be insubstantial. The full audit population exhibits persistent, systemic failures concentrated in the areas governing democratic contestation. Applying my three indices, I show how this conclusion is sustained.

Purpose, Index 1, focuses especially on Articles 34 and 35: risk assessment and risk mitigation. They rank highest by request frequency among the EC's enforcement priorities. Of the 58 requests for information, 15 led to the opening of an investigation or formal proceedings (KPMG, 2026, p. 26). There is no DSA requirement for auditors to disclaim if an EC investigation is underway; as Holznagel (2025, Observation 1) argues, Article 37 contains no provision allowing obligations under investigation to be skipped. On my reading, disclaiming risks rendering the audit opaquer rather than more accountable. The first enforcement outcome indicates what that opacity may conceal. The Commission's €120 million fine on X, its first non-compliance decision under the DSA, concerned deceptive interface design, the advertisement repository and researcher data access (European Commission, 2025b). These are Articles 25, 39 and 40(12), precisely the obligations on which BDO declined to reach a conclusion in X's second audit cycle (Table 3.2). In the same benchmark, KPMG note that Articles 14, 15, 24 and 42 “remain challenging” (KPMG, 2026, p. 6). This is more than a challenge. Platforms, simply put, are failing to provide users with a means to understand what happens to them once they enter a platform’s systems. Data indicates the typical global social media user is active on 6.5 platforms each month (DataReportal, 2026). Within the EU specifically, social media use is reported as an average of 67 percent with the range being 56-90 percent of citizens (data.europa.eu, 2026). A user does not need every platform they use to fail Article 34/35 to be affected. Partial failure across a user's platform portfolio still compounds, returning to my Section 1 position, leaving the user increasingly blind and casting doubt on the extent of their agency. Based on KPMG's analysis, four of my five Purpose indicators score poorly. Only Depth of verification remains clear of issues. Article 14's gaps hit Disclosure and Public availability. Articles 15, 24 and 42's benchmarking problems undermine Independent verification and Methodological concurrence. That is 80 percent of my Purpose indicators, impacted by findings the auditors themselves describe as challenging.

Petition, Index 2, particularly Article 16(5), returned a 43 percent negative-opinion rate. This is the highest failure rate of any Article in the DSA (KPMG, 2026, p. 6). The Harm Index registered the same obligation as unverified for Meta in both cycles and for X in Cycle 2, where Article 16(5) was disclaimed (Table 3.2). KPMG's cohort-wide figure shows it is not an isolated problem but a multi-platform failure. KPMG highlight related issues within the statement of reasons, Article 24(5), Transparency Database transmission and the use of duplicate statements of reasons (KPMG, 2026, p. 17). Petition assesses whether there is addressability. It asks, ‘can a request for justification be issued and acted on?’ Article 16(5) fails that test in nearly half of all audited cases, largely through late notifications and missing redress options. The statement-of-reasons problems KPMG document in their Transparency Database analysis deepen this failure. Duplicate and lost records weaken the evidentiary trail even where a notification is issued. This two-pronged dilution affects the making of a request and the understanding of any reply, if received at all. Addressability is a key space of reasons concept. Barriers to it push platform actions towards the edge of democracy, again.

Peer, Index 3, is implicated by KPMG's findings on transparency data and dispute settlement. Transmission of statements of reasons to the Transparency Database, under Article 24(5), produced duplicate statements and missing submissions. KPMG notes undocumented or unverified calculation methodologies in transparency reporting more broadly (KPMG, 2026, p. 17). Dispute settlement produces a positive and a negative finding. The positive is that challenge is being made. Eleven certified bodies across eight Member States now handle disputes under Article 21 (European Commission, 2026c) and one, Appeals Centre Europe, has received over 30,000 disputes (Hughes, 2026). These typically arrive at out-of-court dispute settlement (ODS) bodies when users contest content or account decisions. The negative lies in how platforms handle the route. Negative audit opinions on Article 21 obligations rose from none in the first cycle to between 5 and 10 percent in the second, citing the lack of a documented ODS process, decision templates that omitted information on dispute settlement bodies, inconsistent notifications and informal handling procedures (KPMG, 2026, p. 16). Platform responses compound this. Because ODS decisions are non-binding, platforms can and do disengage. Hughes (2026) reports that "in the vast majority of cases, platforms are unable or unwilling to provide" the content needed to examine a dispute, especially for account suspensions. In essence, platforms are more likely to withhold content. Platforms are required to engage with ODS bodies in good faith (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Art. 21(2); European Commission, 2026c), so persistent non-cooperation is the type of activity that could draw Commission scrutiny. Whether it does is discretionary (Art. 66(1)), with the burden of enforcement falling back on Commission intervention rather than on the dispute mechanism functioning as designed. The impact reaches further into the audit process. Should an Article fall under investigation, it is likely to be disclaimed (Albert, 2025; Holznagel, 2025, Observation 1; KPMG, 2026, p. 14), producing no audit conclusion, which the Harm Index scores 0.

KPMG record zero negative opinions under Article 40 in cycle 2, but their report gives two distinct reasons for this. They do not carry the same weight. Auditors were "unable to conclude" for several platforms because of ongoing EC investigations (KPMG, 2026, p. 23), a disclaimer. Separately, roughly half the population had obligations 40(1) to 40(7) marked "not applicable" because the Delegated Act became operational in October 2025, outside the audit timeframe (KPMG, 2026, p. 23). KPMG presents this as a matter of timing. I read it as inconsistency. Identical circumstances produced different audit treatment. The remaining platforms, facing the same timeline, still received audit opinions on the same Articles (KPMG, 2026, p. 23). That inconsistency points at the standardisation of approach and, more worryingly for the space of reasons, weakens the value of platform analysis individually and across the full cohort. An independent examination of researcher access under Article 40(12) found it "substantially incomplete and systematically biased" (Bekavac and Mayer, 2026, p. 3). Using sockpuppet accounts, Bekavac and Mayer reconstructed what users were shown in TikTok's For You feed during the 2024 US presidential election (July–November 2024) and Meta's Instagram Explore feed during the 2025 German federal election (January–February 2025), over 4,000 posts in total, and compared it with what the TikTok Research API and Meta Content Library returned for the same posts. Researchers could access only around 75 percent of the TikTok posts and 50 percent of the Instagram posts users saw (Bekavac and Mayer, 2026, p. 6)³. The ability to reconstruct or challenge system logic that Peer requires is obscured by the absence of negative findings, which is not the same as a positive outcome. This matters because Article 40(12) provides access specifically for research that "contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union" (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Art. 40(12)), and those risks include negative effects on "civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security" (Art. 34(1)(c)). These are core areas my Harm Index is designed to identify and where noumenal power is most threatened. Where elections, civic discourse and public security are dominated, the space of reasons is constrained.

The DSA provides a framework against which VLOPs can be measured. This provides phenomenal outputs which identify multiple areas in which platforms are failing to meet their democratic obligations. This is not just a matter of mistakes being made. The ongoing nature of these problems and platforms' documented unwillingness to cooperate with dispute resolution, even when users are directly affected, show issues of governance, failure to act and disregard for user concerns. These are not accidental. They are choices which reduce users' roles in the accountability structure. KPMG's cross-platform benchmark corroborates my Harm Index, albeit adopting a broad reporting rather than in-depth system analysis. Bekavac and Mayer (2026) provide a highly focused, Article 40, analysis examining Meta and TikTok, directly linking to and reinforcing Article 24 transparency concerns. Articles 24 and 40 are core Articles impacting multiple further Articles. This highlights substantive concerns from my Harm Index. Problems with access and transparency generate a foundation capable of obscuring a platform's purpose. Linking to the interdependent structure of my Harm Index, this creates issues with a willingness to be petitioned and opportunities to challenge. Co-authorship is rendered improbable at even the most minimal of levels.

These choices extend beyond platforms' relationship with users to their relationship with the regulator. Platforms increasingly exercise functions once reserved to states, a shift Pasquale (2017) describes as “replacing the logic of territorial sovereignty with functional sovereignty”. Across the audit record they act towards the state less as regulated entities and more as counterparts contesting its authority to bind them. Platforms define the obligation: the audit criteria are built from benchmarks the audited provider supplies (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/436, Art. 10(2)(a); Holznagel, 2025, Observation 2) and Meta treats Article 14(3) as not applicable to a service minors demonstrably use (Section 6). Platforms can and do restrict verification, with obligations under Commission investigation going unaudited and the research access through which compliance could be tested independently returning an incomplete picture of what users see (Bekavac and Mayer, 2026, p. 6). Platforms absorb sanctions. As Section 1 noted, penalties capped at a fraction of turnover (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Art. 74(1)) can function as a cost of doing business. The DSA's first penalty, €120 million against X, addressed three transparency obligations while the wider investigation into illegal content and information manipulation remains open (European Commission, 2025b). The response to that decision made the state-versus-platform dimension explicit. In a post on X, the United States Secretary of State said the fine "isn't just an attack on [X], it's an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments" (Rubio, quoted in Wardwell, 2025). The administration linked further fines to the threat of tariffs on the EU (Wardwell, 2025). A dispute between a regulator and a regulated platform was recast as a dispute between states. In Diamond and Morlino's terms, the DSA positions platforms in a relationship of horizontal accountability, answering to public bodies with the legal authority to check them (2004, pp. 25–26). The audit record shows platforms taking part instead as counterparts: choosing the checker, supplying the benchmarks, contesting what obligation means and absorbing the sanction. Diamond and Morlino note that agencies of horizontal accountability can be turned against opponents, at a cost to the credibility of the whole network (p. 26). Describing the X decision as an attack by foreign governments levels that charge at the check itself. Towards citizens, the platform occupies the governing position (Section 1; Klonick, 2018, p. 1603). Towards the regulator, it acts as a peer institution, a relation beyond the platform–user focus of Klonick's account. In both relations, it stands where a state would.

Not knowing how an influencing system works prevents citizens from engaging in the space of reasons at all. Platforms are being shown not to fail democracy in isolated cases. They fail it structurally and at scale.

Section 6 - Limits of Indexing

Section 6 addresses three limits and one further, theoretical question. The first two limits are external, arising from the DSA audit architecture on which the Harm Index depends: the absence of an agreed audit standard and the small number of reporting cycles. The third is internal, following from the Index's minimum-based, non-compensatory aggregation. The question is theoretical, concerning how, and to what extent, a platform’s capacity for structural domination can be registered through external, documentary audit: the bridge between the noumenal and the phenomenal on which the Index is grounded (Forst, 2017).

These issues return to the broader design question introduced earlier. The Harm Index is built as a three-index, twelve-indicator test, with its central methodological choice being deliberately reductive. The question is whether this reduction is appropriate for a structure such as the DSA, or whether it risks excluding core features of platform harm. The answer depends on what the Harm Index is intended to measure. It does not attempt to measure every dimension of platform quality. It asks whether the minimum conditions for a contestable space of reasons remain present.

This does not reject deliberative, thicker, democracy or deny the importance of assessing the quality of public reasoning. Habermas’s deliberative account evaluates mediated political communication in terms of publicity and transparency, inclusion and equal opportunities for participation and the prospect of reasonable outcomes (Habermas, 2006, p. 413). It also depends on a public sphere sufficiently independent of its social environments and capable of sustaining feedback between informed public discourse and responsive civil society (pp. 417–420). My claim and focus is prior to that evaluation. Before the quality of platform-mediated deliberation can be assessed, those subject to platform power must retain minimum standing. This provides the foundation from which to identify governing rules, direct demands for justification to an effective addressee and contest those rules. Where these conditions are absent, deliberation may still occur as observable speech, participation or interaction, but its quality cannot compensate for the prior failure of the conditions that make it democratic. The Harm Index, therefore, operates at the threshold of deliberative assessment, it asks whether the democratic space within which deliberation could count as democratic remains open. The threshold is specified here through Forst’s account of standing in the space of reasons and Diamond and Morlino’s account of vertical accountability, rather than through a direct assessment of discursive quality (Forst, 2017, pp. 45–50; Diamond and Morlino, 2004, pp. 21, 25–29).

Addressing the design choice. My Harm Index has shown that a method can be applied to the complex situations generated by algorithmic practices. Such systems can be rendered impenetrable by design, through secrecy and obfuscation (Pasquale, 2015, pp. 6–7) or through the complexity of the system itself (Burrell, 2016, pp. 4–5). What happens, and how outputs are produced, remains unknown to the addressee. Where information is withheld in order to steer, Forst counts the withholding itself as an exercise of power (Forst, 2017, p. 49 n. 48). Agency is degraded as a result. Addressees within the space of reasons become no more than variables themselves, acted upon rather than reasoned with (Forst, 2017, p. 50). Pasquale identifies obfuscation as concealment through excess, as when a firm answers a request for information with 30 million pages of documents (2015, p. 6), and warns that transparency can provoke complexity as effective at defeating understanding as secrecy. His remedy is to limit it (p. 8). I argue that the same risk attaches to measurement. An index that tracks every variable risks becoming an administrative wall of its own: each additional indicator is another point at which the measured party can contest definitions, supply its own benchmark or hide a failure among many passes. A large-variable approach would therefore reproduce the problem it sets out to measure. Goertz's necessary-and-sufficient structure guards against this: applied here, each added condition must earn its place as necessary, not merely relevant (2006, pp. 35–39). The aim must be to reduce complexity and, where that cannot be achieved, to create an environment in which proxies can at least interpret the system and report back on its behaviour, a version of Pasquale's qualified transparency (2015, p. 142). These proxies are the agencies of horizontal accountability introduced in Section 5: bodies with the "expertise and legal authority needed for such a monitory role" (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). Where citizens cannot see into a system, vertical accountability can run only through such proxies, which are in turn informed by researchers and civil society acting as agents of vertical accountability (p. 29). Under the DSA, neither the proxies nor the feed that informs them holds. Diamond and Morlino require public bodies independent of those they oversee (p. 26). The DSA's auditor is instead a private firm, selected and paid by the platform it audits, and it cannot require solutions. The Commission holds that authority but is not obliged to use it (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Arts 37(6), 66(1)). Researcher access, the vertical feed, is incomplete (Bekavac and Mayer, 2026, p. 6). The Independence, Enforceability and System access indicators score these conditions.

Reducing complexity matters because, when examining platforms or any other potential democratic impediment, two questions arise: how is harm being caused? and how do we agree on what to include when measuring it? The first tests the hypothesis: how close a platform comes to dominating the space of reasons. The second tests why one variable should be included rather than another. The Harm Index is designed to ask the first question and to provide a means of answering it.

The DSA's structure illustrates why that discipline matters. Chapter III, the audit chapter, contains between 168 and 178 possible points of obligation across its Articles and sub-Articles, depending on how the auditor itemises them.⁴ That two auditors do not itemise the same chapter identically is itself an instance of the concurrence problem set out in Section 2. The points are only "possible" because not all Articles apply to all VLOPs and, as shown, many do not apply to VLOSEs. Article 14(3) is a case in point: it exempts services not "primarily directed at minors or … predominantly used by them" (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Art. 14(3)). What counts as a minor, and how platforms exclude them, is an issue in itself. Facebook does not apply Article 14(3), even though, as its own auditor records, minors use the service (Ernst & Young LLP, 2024, p. 10). The result is that the Article is considered and marked not applicable: a variable given a null value is not the same as an Article left uncommented or disclaimed. In practice, the determination is co-produced within the platform–auditor relationship: the platform supplies the factual and interpretive conditions and the auditor records the resulting applicability judgement. Facebook, for example, has marked Article 14(3) not applicable in both the 2024 and 2025 audit cycles (Ernst & Young LLP, 2024, pp. 9–10; 2025, p. 10). By the second cycle, the determination appears only as a shaded cell in a summary table, with no reasoning given. Regardless of how a platform answers any given Article, it remains open to challenge by the EC, typically not under the Article marked, but under others entirely. The Commission's proceedings against Meta on the protection of minors, for example, concern Articles 28, 34 and 35 (European Commission, 2024a). Article 14(3) therefore escapes scrutiny by the Harm Index, but its underlying concern, impact on minors, is captured by Articles 34 and 35, which sit within Index 1, Purpose.

A model that attempted to track every Article of the DSA, scoring each sub-Article individually, scales massively and multiplies disputes over interpretation. Consider who counts as a minor and how a platform can exclude them from Article 14(3) even when minors of every description evidently do access these platforms. This does not measure harm at the edge. Instead, it becomes a model for measuring the quality of platform service, returning to the in-depth measure declined in Section 2. Such a model is useful in answering a different question: how democratic platforms are and how well they measure against different modes of democracy. That project would move forward on the assumption that the space of reasons is already open, asking how well platforms operate within it. We are not yet at that stage. The Harm Index measures quality at the minimum number of points necessary, assessing not how well a platform performs – at zero it is dominating and at one it sits on the edge of domination - but whether the boundary beyond which questions of quality lose meaning has already been crossed.

The first limit is that no agreed substantive standard exists against which auditors measure compliance. The Delegated Regulation fixes the audit process (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/436, Arts 9–12), but the DSA leaves core terms, including what counts as "significant", undefined (Section 3), with the audit criteria defined on the basis of benchmarks the audited provider itself supplies (Art. 10(2)(a), read with Art. 5(1)(a)). Auditors' professional standards do not fill the gap: as EY notes, they "prohibit the auditing organization from developing its own criteria" (Google Ireland Limited, 2025c, p. 172). Each platform therefore supplies the benchmark it is then measured against with auditors accepting those benchmarks case by case (Ernst & Young LLP, 2024, p. 31). As the number of VLOPs grows, so will the number of self-authored benchmarks. The problem has the potential to compound over time. The Harm Index does not offer guidance on what an externally imposed benchmark might look like, but it does highlight the need for one. The KPMG cross platform benchmarking report (KPMG, 2026, pp. 9, 14, 19, 23) supports this point. Whilst comparability across auditors was not KPMG's stated purpose, the report illustrates how far interpretation diverges within the 2025 cycle. KPMG's own findings are pitched at the level of headline concern rather than an in-depth analysis, yet those headline concerns point to the same Articles, and underlying issues, that the Harm Index's own in-depth analysis identifies independently. Measurement platform to platform carries this structural limit. However, the absence of an agreed set of guidelines, whilst it constrains cross-platform comparison, does not prevent the Index from identifying whether a platform falls on the domination side of the threshold the Index identifies.

The second limit is time. The DSA is a new instrument, with two full cycles of audits and implementation reports so far submitted. Two cycles are not enough, on their own, to distinguish an emerging pattern from a short-term issue generated as part of the audit embedding process. Later audit cycles might resolve current issues. However, what strengthens the case for harm identification at this early stage is convergence across sources with different methods and different interests. KPMG's cross-platform analysis (KPMG, 2026, pp. 6, 14, 23), which comes from within the audit profession (see Section 5), identifies concerns on the same Articles the Harm Index flags. That a firm inside the European Contact Group reaches headline concerns consistent with the Index is notable. The independent sources come from outside the profession. Holznagel (2025, Observations 1–2) and Albert (2025), analysing the audit reports directly, document the same disclaimer gaps and the reliance on provider-defined benchmarks. Bekavac and Mayer (2026) work from an entirely different evidence base. Using ‘sockpuppet’ accounts, they reconstructed TikTok's For You feed during the 2024 US presidential election and Instagram's Explore feed during the 2025 German federal election, and compared what users were shown with what the platforms' research interfaces returned for the same posts (pp. 3, 6). Researchers could access only around 75 percent of the TikTok posts and 50 percent of the Instagram posts, and, for accessible posts only, 17 and 42 percent respectively of the metadata transmitted to users (p. 6)³. Their concern is research-led scrutiny rather than the Article 37 audit, but the two meet at Article 40(12). That obligation was disclaimed for Facebook in both cycles and for X in Cycle 2 (Table 3.2). Where the audit record does not report, external testing of Meta's Content Library, the tool through which Meta provides Article 40(12) access across its services, found it substantially deficient. As Bekavac and Mayer put it, accountability resting on such access risks becoming "procedurally satisfied but substantively weakened" (p. 13).

The movement the Harm Index captures across this period is not one-directional, pointing only to negative outcomes. Scores shift up and down across indicators and indices, showing the Harm Index responds to change rather than tracking a single downward path, allowing emergent problems to be isolated before poor platform and auditing habits become embedded as standard practice. The dataset is limited, but the harms at stake, including physical risks to users and the possibility of democratic domination, are not merely hypothetical (In re Social Media Litigation, 2026; European Commission, 2026a). Available evidence already indicates that the conditions enabling them are present. Two audit cycles cannot settle every question about the long-term operation of the DSA. They are nevertheless sufficient to justify a provisional threshold diagnosis where the audit record, independent legal analysis and external testing converge on the same failures of verification, access and contestation.

The third limit is the Harm Index's own methodology: minimum-based, non-compensatory aggregation (Greco et al., 2019, pp. 75, 79). The decision rule, and its grounding in the necessary-and-sufficient structure of the concept, is set out in Section 2 (Figures 1 and 2; Goertz, 2006). The resulting values should be understood as ordinal threshold categories rather than cardinal measures of the amount of harm, we are not measuring the quantity of harm at the edge. A score of 0 does not represent twice the harm of a score of 1, and a score of 2 does not indicate the absence of all platform-related harm. Instead, the values identify the platform’s position in relation to the threshold tested by the Index: 0 indicates that a necessary condition has failed; 1 indicates that standing is precarious, at the edge of domination; and 2 indicates that standing is secure: no failure has been identified within the tested conditions. The score therefore records whether the relevant democratic conditions are present, not the quantity or comparative severity of harm.

The rule applies no differential weighting between indicators and no graduated severity within them. Any failing indicator, regardless of how narrowly or badly it failed, is treated as an equally sufficient trigger. This neutral weighting is not an omission but follows from the structure of the concept: each index is necessary, so none can count for more than another (Section 2). It does, however, create a problem for action. Determining which Article failures matter more is not part of the question the Index answers, which is a threshold question: whether the edge of democracy has been crossed into domination. It is, however, central to remediation. If only one indicator/Article pairing failed, the solution to this is straightforward – address that Article. However, where more than one Article fails, as Section 4's findings for Meta and X show, the complexity discussed earlier in this section revolves around providing a weight to Articles. Returning to the earlier Article 14(3) exploration, addressing Articles 28, 34 and 35 would reduce harm to minors but, likewise, removing the ability to disapply 14(3) would also address the minor harm more directly. These are questions that flow from the Harm Index addressing the phenomenal issues generated by platforms pushing domination into a more balanced space of reasons. A future extension of this model, built once the thin, threshold-testing case argued here has been established, would introduce a deliberately weighted layer on top of the existing Index. This preserves the threshold judgement for which the headline score is designed: no necessary condition of democratic standing may be offset by strong performance elsewhere. A weighted layer can then support the separate task of remediation, distinct from the further question of quality that arises only once a system scores 2 throughout (Section 7).

This leaves the theoretical question: the edge of democracy problem linked to noumenal power, which underpins the Harm Index. As I have covered, the Harm Index tests for the thin, threshold question of democracy, not how well debate and choice function, but whether the conditions for them to exist at all are present. Diamond and Morlino set out a minimum threshold for democracy which includes, among other criteria, universal suffrage and alternative sources of information (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 21, drawing on Dahl, 1971). Of these, alternative sources of information is a key criterion linking platform impact and democracy. Where curation and opacity limit meaningful access to alternative sources, for example, the edge condition itself is unmet, and questions of how well debate might proceed cannot yet be asked.

As demonstrated in Sections 1 and 2, the three indices are mutually dependent and together provide the minimum grounding for individual standing within the space of reasons (Figure 1; Table 2.1). Accessing algorithmic logic without an addressee to respond to challenges, Purpose without Petition, renders that access of no practical use. An addressee able to respond, but with no identifiable logic to respond about, Petition without Purpose, leaves the right to object formally available but substantively empty. Without access to the "how" behind a decision, any answer at all can be offered to the "why" raised in an objection, since there is nothing fixed to check it against. Providing access to the logic of outputs and a named addressee without any possibility of contesting the response, Purpose and Petition without Peer, becomes a unidirectional notification, in much the same way the Transparency Database operates (Section 5). Each case, missing a condition, produces not a weaker version of standing but a distinct and independently recognisable overall failure. This mutual dependence means each index is a necessary feature of the other two. The Index triad resembles Bovens's (2007) definition of accountability as a relationship in which an actor must inform and justify its conduct, a forum can question and judge it, and the actor may face consequences (pp. 450–452). For Bovens, transparency alone does not amount to accountability, since it involves no scrutiny by a specific forum (p. 453): the Purpose-without-Petition case above. I take this to illustrate the logic of Section 2. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient, a point Bovens makes in calling it instrumental to accountability rather than constitutive of it (p. 450), and it is non-substitutable. It cannot stand in for an addressee, nor can an addressee stand in for it. Petition's enforceability indicator likewise tracks his requirement that the actor may face consequences, the possibility of which "makes the difference between non-committal provision of information and being held to account" (p. 451). Peer lies outside his framework, by design. Bovens separates participation from accountability, treating it as a prospective input rather than retrospective account-giving (p. 453). The Harm Index includes it because democratic standing requires more than the ability to hold power to account after the fact; it requires some standing in the rules under which that power is exercised. The Index therefore contains accountability in Bovens's narrow sense, but measures more than it.

The accounts of power and domination used here are complementary rather than identical. Forst himself distinguishes his discourse-theoretical account of non-domination from Pettit's neo-republican one: it focuses not on the robust protection of spheres of individual choice but on "the normative standing of persons as justificatory equals" (Forst, 2017, p. 51). Forst identifies the justificatory dimension of power: whether those subject to a rule stand as equal participants in the space of reasons (Forst, 2017, pp. 43, 49). Pettit identifies domination as exposure to arbitrary interference (Pettit, 1997, p. 52), while Gädeke clarifies how domination may be structurally constituted even in the absence of a recurring, directly observable act of interference (Gädeke, 2020, pp. 205–211). I draw on Pettit and Gädeke to specify the structural persistence of domination, while locating its democratic significance, for the Harm Index, in Forst's space of reasons.

Domination, within my use of noumenal power, is a distinct kind of power. Pettit defines it as the capacity to interfere arbitrarily in another's choices, whether or not that capacity is exercised (Pettit, 1997, p. 52). Gädeke adds that the capacity must be structurally constituted. A mugger does not dominate simply because a mugging occurs; what matters is whether the capacity to interfere is robust, enabled by the norms and practices around it, rather than opportunistic (Gädeke, 2020, pp. 205–207). The same distinction applies to platforms. A user need not be acted upon by a platform at a particular moment to be subject to domination. That domination lies in the architecture: unidentifiable logic, lack of addressee, inability to influence outcomes, not any single act of interference. Nor does withdrawal end it. Gädeke's account of systemic domination describes a person who avoids any direct relation with a dominator yet remains subject to the norms and practices that constitute their disempowerment, lacking "the status as a normative authority" (p. 210). Where Pettit would treat such a person as merely at risk of domination, Gädeke treats them as dominated (p. 211). A user who disconnects from platforms likewise reduces their exposure to any specific act of interference, but the architecture, and its capacity to affect every user who remains, is untouched. Aytac (2024, p. 14) reaches a related conclusion by a different route. For Aytac, given network effects and the absence of genuine alternatives, the cost of exit is too high for user consent to carry normative weight. Gädeke's account supports a stronger claim. Even where exit is affordable, it leaves the dominating structure unchanged (Gädeke, 2020, pp. 210–211). Applied to platforms, a user who leaves remains subject to the architecture, as do all who stay. Domination, for Gädeke, is a position of power rather than an action (2020, p. 207). In Forst's terms, that condition is located in the space of reasons rather than inflicted moment to moment (cf. Forst, 2017, pp. 45–46).

This has a direct consequence for how the Harm Index treats withdrawal. A user who deletes their account reduces the phenomenal trace available for individual-level observation: within the Transparency Database, for example, there is less to find. This is why the Harm Index is built to score platform-level, documentary evidence rather than individual complainant or interaction data. A method tied to individual interaction could treat withdrawal as if it resolved the underlying condition. My method, tied to systemic domination, treats such withdrawal as irrelevant to the score, since the architecture, after the user has departed, remains exactly as unaccountable for the users who remain.

The closest prior account of platform domination is Aytac's (2024), which argues on Pettit's neo-republican terms that social media companies dominate citizens in two ways: directly, through content moderation and, indirectly, through algorithmic control that narrows citizens' choices about how to engage in public debate (pp. 8, 13–18). Aytac classifies this as ‘quasi-public domination’. Such domination is seen as private in origin, but targeting individuals qua citizens (pp. 7, 10–11). I differ in four key respects. First, Aytac deliberately adopts an agent-centric conception of domination, setting aside structural accounts on the ground that platform power is centralised and intentional (p. 9). I treat domination as a structurally constituted condition, rather than a capacity of an identifiable agent, in a similar vein to Gädeke and Forst. Second, the public/private categorisation, even qualified as quasi-public, does not locate the problem. As I argued in Section 1, platforms occupy part of the position in vertical accountability that Diamond and Morlino assign to those who govern, exercising power over the space of reasons in which citizens form and contest political judgements, to which justification is therefore owed. The issue is not whether that power is private or public in origin. The problem is that it is exercised from the answerable position without answerability attached. Third, the relationship runs in two directions. Aytac's account concerns platforms' power over citizens. The audit record indicates platforms acting towards the regulator less as regulated entities and more as counterparts, the horizontal dimension of accountability, which the quasi-public framing does not reach (Section 5). Fourth, Aytac's argument is diagnostic (p. 19). The Harm Index operationalises the conditions his argument implies and tests them against the DSA's audit record. That record substantiates two of his replies to objections: regulation leaves enforcement discretion with the companies (pp. 19–20) and platform-built contestation mechanisms fall short of unconditional access to contestation (p. 15). On the first, the audit criteria are built from benchmarks the platforms themselves supply, so that Meta's own definitions, such as 72 hours for "without undue delay", become the standard against which Meta is audited (Ernst & Young LLP, 2024, p. 31; Holznagel, 2025, Observation 2). On the second, the out-of-court dispute settlement route the DSA establishes cannot bind platforms and platforms routinely withhold the content needed to examine a dispute (Hughes, 2026; Section 5), exactly the conditional, goodwill-dependent access to contestation Aytac identifies in the Oversight Board. What Aytac argues from theory, the audit record documents.

In day-to-day use, individuals mostly experience platform behaviour not as domination but as ordinary interaction, feeds refreshing, items liked, recommendations arriving. No person or organisation is physically compelling anything. The same governing logic is applied at scale, to millions of users at once, without any of them individually assenting to or examining it, since at that scale, none of them can. Forst's account of noumenal power locates this kind of conformity at one end of a spectrum of acceptance, running from justifications explicitly weighed and accepted through to those accepted almost blindly, without further question, in the way social conformity is accepted rather than examined (Forst, 2017, p. 41). Platform engagement sits at the almost blind end of that spectrum. The governing logic behind what appears in a feed is not so much rejected or endorsed as simply gone along with, which is precisely why its noumenal character, closing off rather than opening a space of reasons, remains available to an external audit. Whether the audits the DSA produces do this work is a separate question, addressed in Sections 4 and 5, but the possibility of external verification does not depend on users themselves recognising the closure.

A thicker account of democracy would require a correspondingly thicker account of power, one capable of assessing the quality of reasoning and debate itself. Noumenal power is not that. It operates at the threshold level, on the edge, not asking how well an individual reasons, but whether they retain any standing to reason at all. This is what makes it the appropriate theoretical tool for a thin democratic position. At its root, noumenal power names the capacity to shape what individuals think and do through relations of justification and influence (Forst, 2017, pp. 38–50). That capacity is currently held unevenly, with platforms exerting it asymmetrically over those subject to their systems.

Taken as a whole, the absence of an agreed audit standard, the immaturity of the DSA's reporting cycle, the trade-off inherent in minimum-based aggregation and the noumenal grounding set out above, identify the edges of what the Harm Index can do. What it does is convert a threshold claim into three conditions an external analysis can verify, scoring platforms against that threshold using evidence the platforms and auditors have made public. Section 4's application of that threshold and Section 5's account of what it reveals about the audit architecture together provide my diagnosis. This is not a verdict on how well platforms are governed but a finding on whether governance, in the minimal sense the edge requires, is present at all. Section 7 draws this together and considers what a thicker, weighted model, held back from the thin instrument built here, might add once this threshold work is complete.

Section 7 - Conclusion

The core objective of my research was to test whether VLOPs operate at the edge of democracy and whether that condition can be measured. Using the DSA as a case study, I have shown that its requirements can be translated into a minimal set of threshold variables: twelve indicators grouped into three indices. Each index captures an aspect of democratic standing drawn from Forst's space of reasons and Diamond and Morlino's account of vertical accountability. From the wider group of VLOPs covered by the DSA, the Harm Index was applied to Meta, X and YouTube. The Index produces a clear answer. Meta and X both score 0, the lowest score the Index can produce. Under the Index’s non-compensatory rule, derived from a necessary-and-sufficient concept structure in which no condition can be compensated for by performance elsewhere (Goertz, 2006, pp. 35–46), that score means that at least one necessary condition for democratic standing has failed. This means that each platform falls on the domination side of the threshold the Harm Index specifies, the minimum documentary conditions of democratic standing are not all present. YouTube scores 1, clearing the floor but remaining at the edge of domination rather than securely beyond it. On evidence drawn from data that platforms and auditors have themselves made public, together with KPMG's analysis of 21 VLOPs and two VLOSEs, two of the three platforms examined have crossed the threshold into domination: domination in the sense set out in Section 1.

I have demonstrated that threshold crossing can be codified according to where and how failure occurs across platforms. Meta's failure arrives via obligations disclaimed identically in both audit cycles. For Meta, independent verification never happened, so nothing could be found wanting. Here, the audit is empty where the edge of democracy is most exposed. X's failure is different. Its obligations were tested, found to require remediation, but met with reinterpretation of the obligation itself and a change of auditor, rather than action to address the harm-causing behaviour. Where Meta's 0 marks an absence of verification, X's marks disputed verification. YouTube's 1 shows the erosion the Index detects is not a fixed property of the DSA's architecture itself, since the same regulatory instrument and the same twelve indicators produced a different result for a platform whose auditor tested the Articles underlying Meta's and X's own 0 scores, in both cycles, without disclaiming them. The issues raised by Meta's and X's audits are the result of choices available to platforms and auditors under the current rules. These choices do not merely supply evidence of domination. They help constitute the asymmetrical justificatory order through which domination operates, leaving those subject to the systems without effective means to know, challenge or revise the rules governing them (Forst, 2017, pp. 45–50).

The limits examined in Section 6 are part of the methodological choices that made the core findings possible. A model built to test whether the minimum conditions for a contestable space of reasons remain present inevitably declines to test others, such as whether an Article was correctly marked not applicable or whether scoring should sum or average rather than take the minimum. Restricting the Index to a small, non-compensatory set of indicators is what keeps the threshold question separate from a quality-of-service question the Harm Index cannot answer. Grounding the model in noumenal power (Forst, 2017, pp. 45–46) sets aside a thicker, more deliberative account of platform harm in favour of one that can be evidenced from documentary audit alone. What these limits bound is how much the Index can say. They do not bound whether what it says, for Meta and X, is correct.

In creating the Harm Index, weighting has two distinct parts to play, following the threshold judgement. The first is remediation. Where a system fails on several indicators at once, as Meta and X do, a weighted layer built on the diagnostic map Sections 3 and 4 produce can order which failures to repair first (Section 6). It decides the sequence of remediation, not whether remediation is required. The second is quality. Once a system sits securely clear of the threshold, scoring 2 throughout, the question changes from whether standing is present to how well a system performs within an open space of reasons. A weighted, cross-platform layer of that kind would sit in the same family as existing multi-indicator democracy indices, such as V-Dem (Nord et al., 2026), built to rank and compare rather than to threshold-test. What either layer weighs or how is not argued here. Both depend on a settled account of what counts as failure in the first place, which is what the Harm Index provides.

The DSA has worked as a live test case. The twelve indicators are analysed against specific DSA Articles, providing citable evidence. What those indicators test, the minimum conditions for a contestable space of reasons, is not bound to the DSA, geography or regulatory framework. A jurisdiction without an equivalent to Article 37’s audit duty, or without a proxy resembling an Article 21 dispute-settlement mechanism, would score 0 on the relevant indicator by default. There would still be no independent verification or external addressee to generate a higher score. The Index does not require the DSA’s specific architecture to function. It does require that a platform’s operation can be checked against evidence external to the platform, however that check occurs. Extending the model to a non-DSA jurisdiction, the UK’s Online Safety Act for example, would require a new crosswalk between the same twelve indicators and that jurisdiction’s own regulatory instruments, rather than a redesign of the Index itself. The Online Safety Act provides a contrast on one indicator in particular. Ofcom, not the provider, specifies the content of each categorised service's transparency report through transparency notices, and must publish its own report drawing conclusions from them (Ofcom, 2025). Whether that regulator-specified reporting scores higher on Methodological concurrence than the DSA's provider-defined benchmarks is exactly the kind of question such a crosswalk would answer. This is a separate piece of future work from both weighted layers proposed above.

Algorithmic systems can exercise noumenal power over the space of reasons in which democratic life is conducted, including upward through recommender architectures that shape the preferences and judgements citizens bring to political life (Forst, 2017, pp. 38–50). We are rendered almost blind. The DSA is one of the most developed real-world attempts to hold that power to account. What I have shown is that the DSA, on its present public evidence, has not yet closed the gap it was built to close. Chapter III produces disclosure, audit and publication on schedule, but not yet verification that reaches the systems it is meant to verify. Where that verification is absent, it is absent on the Articles pointing to systemic risk, recommender logic and researcher access: exactly where the democratic stakes are highest. The Harm Index measures that edge and identifies where the threshold has failed. The diagnosis does not prescribe a remedy, but it provides the evidential basis on which restorative action can be ordered. I have shown that these questions can be asked and answered using evidence platforms and auditors are required to make public.

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