A New DSA Audit Finds Platforms Can Silence Creators Who Criticize Them

On 22 July 2026, the tech-accountability nonprofit WHAT TO FIX published an audit of the monetization terms and conditions used by six Very Large Online Platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X. The audit didn't score general content policies — it scored the specific contracts platforms use to govern their revenue-sharing and creator-payout programs, against eight requirements drawn from Article 14 of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires that terms and conditions be written in "clear, plain, intelligible, user-friendly and unambiguous language" and clearly set out the grounds on which a platform may restrict a service.

None of the six platforms passed most of the checks. According to the audit as reported by EU Perspectives, Instagram and TikTok each met only one of the eight requirements, Facebook met two, X met three, and Snapchat was the best performer at four out of eight. YouTube could not be fully assessed at all, because its creator monetization agreements are not publicly available for review — itself a transparency failure under the same standard.

The audit is narrow by design: it looked only at what platforms' own contracts say, not at how those contracts are enforced in practice. That narrowness is what makes the findings hard to dismiss as interpretation. These are direct quotes from live terms of service, checked against a specific legal requirement that has applied to VLOPs since 2023.

The audit's most concrete finding is language that ties a creator's ability to earn money to their willingness to stay quiet about the platform paying them. WHAT TO FIX quotes TikTok's Creator Rewards terms directly: the platform "may temporarily or permanently suspend or terminate your access if you make any derogatory public statement concerning TikTok." Instagram's Affiliate Boosting Programme terms go further, requiring prior clearance before a creator can speak publicly about the relationship at all — the audit quotes language stating the creator "will not issue... any public statements... regarding these Terms... without prior written approval of Meta."

Neither clause is hidden in an obscure appendix; both sit inside the standard terms a creator has to accept to join the respective payout program. Functionally, that means a creator who publicly criticizes TikTok's payout rates, or Meta's handling of a dispute, risks losing access to money already earned through participation in the program — not through a defamation claim or a separate legal process, but through a contractual trigger the platform controls and enforces itself.

That matters because monetization programs are increasingly the primary income stream for full-time creators, not a bonus on top of brand deals. A clause that makes criticism a monetization risk changes what a creator is willing to say publicly about the infrastructure they depend on — which is precisely the chilling effect the DSA's transparency requirements were written to expose and limit, whether or not the clause is ever formally enforced.

Beyond the specific gag clauses, the audit found a structural pattern across all six platforms: every one of them reserves "sole discretion" over enforcement decisions, payment withholding and program termination, without committing in the contract itself to a defined process for how that discretion gets exercised. None of the six disclosed what procedures, tools or review steps sit behind a monetization decision, and none stated what share of enforcement actions are handled by automated systems versus human reviewers — information the DSA's transparency framework is built to surface.

Article 14 doesn't just require plain language; it also requires that platforms "act in a non-arbitrary and non-discriminatory manner" when applying restrictions and take into account the legitimate interests of the people affected. A term that grants unlimited discretion with no stated criteria is difficult to reconcile with that standard, regardless of how clearly the sentence granting the discretion is written — clarity and fairness are separate tests, and a contract can pass one while failing the other.

The audit also found a gap on the creator's side of the ledger: none of the six platforms' terms addressed what happens when a platform's own error costs a creator money — a miscalculated payout, a wrongful suspension later reversed — nor did any clearly explain how a creator appeals a monetization decision. WHAT TO FIX's Belén Luna Sanz summarized the practical effect: "Creators can't meaningfully agree to terms they can't easily find, can't read in their own language, or can't understand."

This audit was built to score six household-name VLOPs, but the legal standard it applied is not VLOP-specific. Article 14 sits in the section of the DSA that applies to every provider of an intermediary service operating in the EU, not just the large platforms subject to the DSA's systemic-risk obligations. A Netherlands- or EU-based UGC clipping or payout platform that publishes its own creator terms and conditions is already bound by the same clarity and non-arbitrariness standard the audit just used to fail TikTok and Instagram — regardless of how many users it has.

That's a reason to read this audit as a checklist, not just a story about Big Tech. Two questions from it translate directly to a smaller platform's own creator agreement: does it reserve discretion to suspend payouts or terminate a creator relationship without stating the grounds in plain language, and does it include any clause — a non-disparagement term, a PR-approval requirement — that could make a creator's public criticism a contractual risk rather than a protected opinion? Both are the exact failure modes this audit documented.

The practical fix is not complicated relative to the compliance work the rest of the DSA demands: state the grounds for restricting or terminating monetization in the terms themselves, disclose whether decisions are automated or human-reviewed, and publish how a creator appeals. A platform that already does this has nothing to change. One that has copied a "sole discretion" clause from a template without checking it against Article 14 has a specific, low-cost item to fix before a regulator — or an audit like this one — does it for them.