A few weeks ago, Vigilia won a case asking TikTok to restore content it had wrongfully removed.

Lo and behold, the same user got new content removed again. This time, the content compared the current actions of US President Donald Trump to that of dictatorial historical figures, alerting in a satirical tone about what the influencer perceived as a democratic backslide in the United States. TikTok removed the post under its "Violent and Hateful Organizations and Individuals" policy. The user appealed the absurd decision but TikTok refused to restore the content. To add insult to injury, the platform warned the user that any further violation would result in his account getting banned from the platform.

Effectively, TikTok was threatening to ban a European influencer commenting on both French and US politics simply because the platform is incapable of doing a proper moderation job. A fitting term to describe this behavior would be "censorship by incompetence".

A few months ago, the user's only recourse would have been to go to court, which would have taken a few years in France (and diverted already-overstretched court resources away from more harmful cases). Now, with the DSA's out-of-court dispute resolution system, a free, fair and relatively quick solution was available, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Vigilia represented the influencer to file a case with ODs body User Rights, which promptly ruled that indeed, TikTok had been wrong and recommended that the platform restore the content. We'll see if they do so.