The European Union’s Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms and search engines providers to assess and mitigate systemic risks. However, regulators and providers both face a fundamental challenge we refer to as the ‘convergence problem’—the inherent difficulty of achieving methodological and definitional agreement across diverse approaches investigating systemic risks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dual-track framework that distinguishes between a permissive Research Standard promoting methodological diversity and a structured Compliance Standard ensuring accountability through systematic documentation. This approach enables meaningful oversight while preserving space for innovation and platform-specific adaptation, offering a model for regulating emerging technologies that balances regulatory certainty with methodological flexibility.
