The way platforms govern user activities has tremendous consequences for how our increasingly digital society is organised. This archive enables citizens, researchers and journalists alike to understand how this governance by platforms has changed over time.

Platform Governance Archive1.0

An archive of key policy documents by 

AI se
|

About this project

The Platform Governance Archive (PGA) is a project to facilitate critical engagement with the way platforms order and govern our communication and activities. It offers an interactive exploration of some major platforms’ set of rules, as well as access to a curated and structured database containing key policies of the platforms’ full lifetime.

Learn more about the team and the project

Data Access And Research

Data for this project has been collected by a combination of automated and manual approaches. For the historical data, the process builds mostly on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We have collected data for ten major platforms and four different document types (terms of service, community guidelines, privacy policies, copyright policies). With this first release, we are starting with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram – and will extend this collection in the weeks and months ahead.

Learn more about data and research

How to contribute and cite

When you use the Platform Governance Archive in your research or reporting, please refer to us along these lines:

Katzenbach, C., Magalhães, J. C., Kopps, A., Sühr, T. & Wunderlich, L. (2021). The Platform Governance Archive. Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XSBPT

We will develop and extend the archive in the upcoming months. If you have any suggestion or feedback don’t hesitate to contact project lead Christian Katzenbach (katzenbach@hiig.de).