Work the queue in order of harm and deadline

How to do it

A first-in, first-out queue lets spam reports bury a threat. Take the severity from the policy table for the worst reason reported. Put threats to life, child safety and authority orders at the top, with targets in minutes or hours. Act on orders from authorities within their deadline sets the times for orders. Article 22 of the Digital Services Act makes online platforms handle notices from trusted flaggers with priority. National coordinators name those flaggers, so keep their list as data and raise their cases one level. Measure the time from receipt to decision for each severity. Those medians go into the yearly moderation report.

Examples

JavaScript example

const TARGET_MINUTES = { 1: 60, 2: 24 * 60, 3: 72 * 60 };

export const compareCases = (a, b) => a.severity - b.severity || Date.parse(a.dueAt) - Date.parse(b.dueAt);

export const overdue = (cases, now = Date.now()) =>
  cases.filter(c => now - Date.parse(c.openedAt) > TARGET_MINUTES[c.severity] * 60_000);

Python example

from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone

TARGET = {1: timedelta(hours=1), 2: timedelta(days=1), 3: timedelta(days=3)}

def case_order(case: dict) -> tuple:
    return (case["severity"], case["due_at"])

def overdue(cases: list[dict], now: datetime | None = None) -> list[dict]:
    now = now or datetime.now(timezone.utc)
    return [c for c in cases if now - c["opened_at"] > TARGET[c["severity"]]]

How to check

A unit test builds a queue of a spam case from Monday and a threat case from Tuesday, and the threat case comes first. A test case from a listed trusted flagger outranks the same case from a user. An alert fires when a severity 1 case stays open past its target in staging.

Sources

• Digital Services Act Article 22

Related rules

• TNS-2 Write the moderation policy as one table of reasons and actions in Trust and safety
• TNS-6 Act on orders from authorities within their deadline in Trust and safety
• CMP-65 Publish a yearly moderation report in Compliance and governance