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 major platforms’ set of rules, as well as access to a curated and structured database containing the key policies of the platforms’ full life-time. While public debates over e.g. the handling of misinformation and hate speech by major platforms have long reached mainstream audiences and policymakers, there is little accessible material to rigorously study the short- and long-term developments of companies’ internal policies. The PGA team at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society has collected and curated a vast collection of thousands of these documents, ranging from Terms of Service (ToS) to Community Guidelines.
The PGA proudly joins the ranks of a set of similarly spirited initiatives such as the Princeton-Leuven Longitudinal Corpus of Privacy Policies and the Open Terms Archive. What sets the PGA apart from these projects are 1) our focus on substantial content policies of platforms (that is, we include not only the legalistic terms of service and privacy policies, but also the much more substantial community guidelines) and 2) a combination of automated and manual collection processes that has allowed us to identify when exactly actual changes to the policies occurred.
On this basis, the PGA can enable citizens, researchers and journalists alike to address key questions of platform governance: How do misinformation or hate speech policies compare across platforms and over time? What are the factors that drive platforms to change policies? If you are interested in using the data or have questions (or concerns) the collection, please consult Data and Research and reach out to the project team. The full data-set will be available at the end of Q2/2021.
Team
Idea and Project Lead:
Christian Katzenbach (HIIG), katzenbach@hiig.de
João Carlos Magalhães (HIIG), joao.magalhaes@hiig.de
Project Team:
Adrian Kopps (HIIG), adrian.kopps@hiig.de
Tom Sühr (HIIG), tom.suehr@hiig.de
Larissa Wunderlich, info@larissawunderlich.de
The project is inspired by Kirsten Gollatz’ pioneering work on the longitudinal collection and analysis of platform policies in her dissertation “Die private Governance der Plattformen zur Regelung grenzüberschreitender Kommunikation” at the University of Zurich.
Funding
This is a project hosted and sustained by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). The research and data collection part has substantially benefited from funding by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the ReCreating Europe consortium (Grant Agreement Number 870626). The Open Science Fellowship offered by Wikimedia Deutschland to João Carlos Magalhães was vital for the launch of the PGA by enabling concept building and data cleaning.
