"You Are Orthos": An Experiment in AI-Assisted Human-Rights-Based Reasoning for Content Moderation Disputes under the Digital Services Act

This paper investigates whether contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can assist the resolution of online content moderation disputes within the institutional framework created by Article 21 of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which enables the establishment of certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies. It presents Orthos, an AI-assisted decision-support system designed to generate human rights-based legal reasoning for disputes between users and platforms. The paper reports the results of an experiment in which the system was applied to a dataset of moderation cases, with the aim of assessing the capacity of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to support human rights-based adjudication at scale. Its central question is whether contemporary LLMs can generate forms of legal reasoning sufficiently disciplined and coherent to assist human rights-based adjudication in high-volume moderation disputes.