improved practices

for

Primary Source Information Shared by Platforms
For researchers to draw their own conclusions about platforms’ content-
removal practices, they need to know what content was actually removed. To
date, the best source for such information has been the Lumen database
(“Lumen”), an archive hosted at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.

Lumen archives legal takedown notices from any platform – or sender – that
chooses to share them. Senders’ personal information, and occasionally – as in
the case of child abuse content – content location URLs are redacted, but
researchers can otherwise review the entire communication. At last check, the
database held some 9.3 million notices, targeting approximately 3.35 billion
URLs.29 The majority comes from Google; other contributors include Twitter,
WordPress, the Internet Archive, Kickstarter, Reddit, and Vimeo. Because the

27 The Ranking Digital Rights 2018 Corporate Accountability Index. https://rankingdigitalrights
Social_Media_and_Democracy