The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with data and design company Visualizing Impact to launch onlinecensorship.org, which collects and tracks content takedown requests.
It's not a raw database of every content request that popular websites receive, per se. Rather, the site collects user-submitted reports of "erroneously or unjustly removed" content and writes reports about these takedown practices (in addition to featuring certain individual takedown stories).
"Onlinecensorship.org exists in order to provide an independent source of information on how social media platforms are governing spaces for discourse online. By crowdsourcing user-generated data on content removals, account suspensions, and appeals, we hope to provide actionable information that can help companies become more accountable to their users, and to ensure that content moderation is conducted both transparently and in the user's best interest," reads the site's description.
The site's existence came about as the result of a $250,000 2014 Knight News Challenge award. Visiting users will be able to submit reports if any of their content has been taken down across a number of different sites: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube. (It's unclear whether the EFF and Visualizing Impact plan to add any more.)
"We want to know how social media companies enforce their terms of service. The data we collect will allow us to raise public awareness about the ways these companies are regulating speech. We hope that companies will respond to the data by improving their regulations and reporting mechanisms and processes—we need to hold Internet companies accountable for the ways in which they exercise power over people's digital lives," said the EFF's Jillian York, one of the site's co-founders, in a statement.
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Beyond just submitting reports about removed content, those visiting can also consult guides regarding the next steps they should take to appeal any takedowns they've experienced. The EFF and Visualizing Impact plan to keep these instructions as updated as possible.
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