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KGI’s latest report in the Measuring Risk series examines what EU risk assessments and US litigation reveal about Snap and YouTube’s approaches to risks on their platforms, with a particular focus on risks to minors. The report explores the gap between what these platforms publicly disclose about risk mitigation and what has emerged through discovery in US litigation, including their own internal research, product development, and risk evaluation.
Across the United States and European Union, two influential digital governance regimes are generating new evidence about how large social media companies conceptualize, assess, and respond to risks associated with their platforms. In the EU, the Digital Services Act (DSA) requires major platforms to conduct and publish annual systemic risk assessments, including risks related to the protection of minors. In the US, hundreds of ongoing lawsuits are revealing internal company documents, depositions, and expert reports that provide a window into how platforms identify, measure, and respond to many of the same risks.
KGI’s Measuring Risk II: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Snap and YouTube compares Snap and YouTube’s 2025 EU risk assessments with evidence emerging from US litigation. Building on Measuring Risk I, which examined Meta and TikTok, Measuring Risk II analyzes what Snap and YouTube publicly disclose about systemic risks on their platforms alongside what has emerged from the US litigation record – including their own internal data, research, communications, and risk evaluation – to reveal how they identify, measure, and respond to those risks in practice.
Measuring Risk II identifies a consistent pattern across Snap and YouTube: platforms possess comprehensive internal data and robust analytical capabilities to understand risks and evaluate whether their mitigations work, yet very little of this measurement capacity is reflected in their EU risk assessments or public communication. Rather than demonstrating whether mitigations are effective, current risk assessments largely describe policies, features, and processes without reporting the outcome-based metrics needed to evaluate their impact.
Key Findings
As EU enforcement matures and US litigation increasingly places internal research, product design, and risk metrics at the center of legal accountability, emerging evidence shows that the constraint for credible platform risk governance is not technical capacity but motivation and transparency.
Across KGI’s Measuring Risk series, it is clear that social media companies have the tools to meaningfully assess risk and prove that risk mitigations work. What is missing is the expectation – enforced consistently by regulators and reinforced by courts – that companies proactively assess risks, mitigate them, and publicly report concrete metrics of effectiveness. This requires a shift from descriptive inventories of mitigation policies toward transparent, metrics-driven risk assessments that demonstrate whether mitigations actually work.
Measuring Risk Series
Measuring Risk I: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Meta and TikTok
Measuring Risk II: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Snap and YouTube
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