How Slack is complying with the Digital Services Act

In February 2024, the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into effect for hosting services, including Slack. The DSA requires that hosting services remove reported content that violates policies or applicable law, among other obligations. 

Slack was built for business collaboration and we’re committed to maintaining Slack as a safe, trusted and productive work environment for our customers. Using Slack to store or share prohibited or illegal content violates our terms and Acceptable Use Policy. When we are alerted to prohibited or illegal content being stored or shared on Slack, we will remove that content from our platform consistent with applicable law and our terms and policies. 

We are constantly improving the tools and controls on our platform so that our customers can do the best work of their lives. Consistent with this mission and with the goals of the DSA, we are introducing the following new capabilities that give our customers more options around managing content in Slack.

For a detailed overview of our compliance efforts under the Digital Services Act, including key metrics and actions, you can view our first DSA Transparency Report here.

Report workspace content to Slack

Workspace members located in the European Union can now report prohibited or illegal content directly to Slack from within their Slack workspace by hovering above the content they’d like to report, clicking on the three-dots icon to access the More Actions menu, and then selecting “Report to Slack.” Further instructions on how to report workspace content to Slack can be found in our Help Center.

Slack will review reports and remove content that violates our policies or applicable law. Reports are reviewed by trained, specialized individuals. We have strict technical controls and audit policies in place to rigorously protect Customer Data, as outlined in our Security Practices. More information on how Slack may exercise its obligation to analyze information to help protect the safety of users and prevent illegal activity can be found in our Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy. 

Flag content in Slack

Customers with Slack Enterprise Key Management are required to enable Slack’s Flag Message feature to manage the review and removal of content in their workspaces. Flag Message allows workspace members to flag potentially harmful content to customer-designated admins for review and, if necessary, removal, in compliance with their organization’s own policies and with applicable law. 

Flagging a message to your organization’s designated Content Admins will not automatically notify the author of the message. If an admin does not have access to the conversation where the content is from (for example, a DM or private channel), they will only see the content of the flagged message and, if applicable, the channel name. Content submitted through Flag Message is only accessible by your Org Owners and designated Content Admins. Slack the company does not access or review content flagged using the Flag Message feature, unless it is separately reported to us. Further instructions on how to flag content can be found in our Help Center.

Points of Contact

If you would like to report workspace content to Slack, please see our Help Center for instructions. If you have questions about Slack’s compliance with the DSA, please reach out to integrity@slack.com.

Slack is an entity of Salesforce. European Commission, EU Member States’ authorities, and European Board for Digital Services representatives should direct inquiries regarding the application of the DSA to dsa-poc@salesforce.com. More information about Salesforce’s compliance with the DSA can be found here.

 

Together with Salesforce, Slack will continue to evolve our tools and policies to ensure that our platform remains a safe, trusted and productive place to work.