When the EU's Digital Services Act harmonised its transparency reporting rules on 1 July 2025, the framework required every large platform operating across Europe to publish biannual reports detailing how many pieces of content they removed, how many accounts they terminated, and how accurate their automated moderation systems were. The first harmonised reports — covering the second half of 2025 — were due by February 2026. The goal was simple: make platform operations legible to regulators, researchers, and citizens.
Bangladesh, with 82.8 million internet users and a national election looming in 2026, is building something structurally different.
A Regulatory Stack That Flows the Wrong Way
Since August 2024, Bangladesh's interim government has passed or proposed a cascade of digital laws: the Cyber Security Ordinance 2025 (effective May 21, 2025), the Personal Data Protection Ordinance 2025, the National Data Governance Ordinance 2025, and proposed amendments to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation Act. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is simultaneously advancing its draft Regulation for Digital, Social Media and OTT Platforms, which mandates 72-hour content removal windows, requires platforms to identify the "first originator" of viral messages — effectively breaking end-to-end encryption — and compels foreign platforms to establish local offices with resident compliance officers who can liaise directly with law enforcement.
Every obligation in this stack flows in the same direction: from platforms toward the state. Platforms must comply with government removal requests, trace messages on demand, store data locally, and designate officers accountable to regulators. Nowhere in this edifice does Bangladesh require platforms to publish public transparency reports about what they have received or done.
What Mandatory Transparency Actually Looks Like
The DSA framework illustrates the alternative model. Platforms must disclose the volume of content removed, the accuracy of automated moderation, the number of account terminations, and the size of their moderation teams — data available to anyone, not just to regulators. A peer-reviewed study published on arXiv in May 2026, evaluating the first harmonised DSA transparency reports from eight major platforms, found that all of them "exhibited issues on data formatting, timeliness, consistency, and completeness" — including X submitting hundreds of thousands of reported actions with zero corresponding Transparency Database entries. Even flawed public data is far more valuable than none: it enables independent auditing, cross-platform comparison, and the identification of systemic over-removal or under-removal patterns that no single regulator would catch alone.
Bangladesh currently has no equivalent. The 279 content removal requests Bangladesh submitted to Google in the first half of 2025 surfaced only because Google voluntarily publishes a Transparency Report — not because Bangladeshi law required it. That figure cannot be independently verified, and Bangladesh has no legal mechanism to compel similar disclosures from other platforms.
The Legitimate Case for Government Access
The government's instinct for platform accountability is not without foundation, and it deserves a fair hearing. Bangladesh faces documented challenges with disinformation campaigns, hate speech targeting religious and ethnic minorities, and coordinated information operations that have historically preceded communal violence. With elections approaching, the stakes are high. UNESCO Dhaka's workshop in January 2026 brought together more than 30 civil society organisations and identified AI-generated deepfakes and mis/disinformation as genuine threats to electoral integrity. Meta itself, at the DRAPAC Bangladesh National Convening on 28 April 2026, acknowledged cross-platform harm challenges while committing to stronger local engagement. Demanding that platforms maintain escalation channels with law enforcement is, in this context, a defensible position.
But Accountability Is Not a One-Way Street
A framework designed only to give the state access to platform data does not produce accountable platforms — it produces surveilled ones. A Human Rights Watch-led joint statement in February 2025 raised the alarm that Bangladesh's digital laws allow police to intercept communications "based merely on suspicion that offenses might occur," and that government agencies are broadly exempt from the Personal Data Protection Ordinance. The state that demands platform accountability is not subject to equivalent scrutiny itself. Bangladesh's Freedom on the Net 2025 score of 45 out of 100 — Partly Free — reflects precisely this asymmetry: improved safeguards against some online harms, paired with structural opacity in how those safeguards operate.
The DRAPAC 2026 convening, which drew 100 participants across government, civil society, private sector, media, and academia, named the missing element directly: "transparency in policy processes and strong accountability safeguards." If the government submits removal requests to platforms, civil society should have a legal right to know — not because Google volunteers it, but because Bangladeshi law requires it. If BTRC orders a platform to block content, that order and its stated basis should be logged in a publicly accessible register. If a platform removes content through its community standards, a quarterly public report should quantify it by category.
What a Proportionate Reform Would Look Like
Bangladesh does not need to transplant the DSA wholesale — the EU's own implementation has already demonstrated that even with harmonised templates and legal mandates, major platforms report inconsistently and incompletely. But the foundational principle is transferable at low cost: any regulatory regime that imposes compliance burdens on platforms in the name of public safety should require those platforms to account for their actions to the public, not just to the regulator. A May 2026 Biometric Update analysis of Bangladesh's platform regulation debate captured the expert consensus: platform duties, independent audits, appeal mechanisms, transparency reports, and data minimisation rules together constitute proportionate governance.
Bangladesh's interim government has shown genuine reform capacity — it repealed the DSA, substantially revised the Cyber Security Act, and passed data protection legislation. The missing piece is a transparency obligation that benefits the public rather than just the state. Semi-annual platform reports covering government request volumes, category-level content removal data, and automated enforcement statistics would cost platforms little while generating disproportionate civic value.
A Template the Region Is Watching
The choice Bangladesh makes on platform transparency will function as a regional signal. Countries that mandate public transparency reports tend to build civil society ecosystems capable of scrutinising both platform and government behaviour. Countries that mandate only government access tend to end up with neither accountable platforms nor an informed public. Bangladesh has built most of the framework it needs. The task now is to turn it to face the right direction.