In late 2025, the National Communications Commission (NCC) Taiwan's competent authority for communications and broadcasting affairs. published its Transparency Report Guidelines and its Complaint and Remedy Mechanism Guidelines. Because Matters is entirely open-source, the project lead couldn't resist running the whole set of guidelines against the platform item by item — “and it turned out almost everything was already compliant; only about ten to twenty percent still needs doing.”

2
NCC advisory guidelinesTransparency Report ＋ Complaint & Remedy
28
line items you can check off one by onemade up of 14 basic ＋ 14 advanced
80–90%
self-assessed as compliantonly 10–20% left to fill in
“It turned out almost everything was already compliant — only about ten to twenty percent still needs a little more work.”

Overall assessment

All four categories currently sit at “partially met.” The most solid footing is Community Watch (public, auditable, and closely aligned with the spirit of the guidelines); what's most lacking is institutionalization and outward disclosure.

Community Watch turns the handler, the reason, the timestamp, the appeal, the re-review, and the public record all into a process outsiders can see. It proves that Matters can deliver auditable governance; what comes next is to grow that capability from a single mechanism into a platform-wide institution.

The five highest-priority gaps

  1. There is still no single, unified entry point for complaints and remedies (one option is to add a dedicated appeals page that gathers every channel in one place, e.g. /appeals).
  2. There is still no platform-level case status or handling deadline (right now an ordinary report only gets a “submitted successfully” reply, and nothing after that).
  3. The transparency report has not yet been shaped into a fixed format (reports, actions taken, and scores would ideally be exportable as data in a fixed format).
  4. There are still no statistics on “government disclosure requests” (the clearest item of all, yet still undone).
  5. Cases involving automation and AI are not yet clearly accounted for (when a model affects whether a piece of content is shown, the source, version, threshold, and appeal path should all be explained).

One sharp tension

If “opening the box” is truly carried all the way through, a platform must disclose not only how it governs its users but also how it responds to state power. Yet for a censorship-resistant platform that has to protect cross-border, sensitive writers, that line of disclosure has to be drawn with great care.

The full item-by-item judgment on all 28 points is in the standalone report, Matters.town NCC Self-Compliance Assessment.

Further reading: NCC item-by-item compliance self-assessment