Tracking Community Guidelines on the Web

Client

Tarleton L. Gillespie, Associate Professor, Information Science Department
Email: tlg28@cornell.edu

Student contact

Supriya Mishra (sm2455@cornell.edu) is setting up a team for this project. If you are interested in joining the team, please contact him.

Background

Many online services set "community guidelines" for their users. (See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines.) To accompany a forthcoming book about these guidelines and their social implications, the client would like to build a site that allows users to examine these policies, across sites and over time.

Project Requirements

The client has identified a possible list of components (starting from simple to more complex):

• A simple database that he would maintain, of about 50 to 80 social media platforms and the URLs for their community guidelines pages, with other related info about the sites. The database would resolve to produce an attractive and user-friendly website that lets readers sort the list by category, year, etc. The backend interface to entering and updating info in the database needs to also be user-friendly.
• A profile page for about 10 to 20 major platforms, that offers the information from that database, with a simple way for him to add links to news about removals and other controversies. The list of links will be organized chronologically.
• A record of substantive changes to site guidelines, presented in a wiki style that clearly indicates what changed and when (modeled after how Tumblr does this: https://github.com/tumblr/policy/commits/master/community-guidelines.txt). This could depend on a service that identifies and sends automatic alerts when a specific page is changed (example: http://trackedcontent.com/); information coming from that service could provide the raw material for developing the wiki style record of the changes.
• For the 10-20 major platforms, a way to (manually, probably) tag portions of the guidelines that relate to key issues (sex, violence, harassment, self-harm, etc), such that a user can compare the statements from each site on the same topic on a single page, such that a page can be generated on "what the sites say about harassment?". This might be merely a database to keep the separate fragments that the client can update, or a way for him to tag parts of the document. How does the site we deal with when the page is changed?