KGI’s work on platform design in policy and industry addresses how platform design choices shape user behavior, risks, and societal outcomes. Through convening experts, engaging policymakers, and translating research into practical guidance, KGI informs platform design choices and policies based on the latest research and evidence.
Each day, billions of users use online tech platforms or scroll through social media feeds, search results, and streaming recommendations that shape what they see, read, and watch. The design of these online platforms, including their algorithmic feeds, influence how users experience the online information environment and determine what users see, wielding enormous influence over users’ online experiences and, increasingly, their lives offline.
There is broad recognition that the way platforms are designed impacts how users, communities, and societies experience benefits and harms from those platforms. The pitfalls of content moderation – including efficacy, consistency, legality, and business sustainability – have spurred a large and growing movement in academia, civil society, and public policy focused instead on how content-agnostic design patterns can more effectively support prosocial interactions and user well-being.
Federal, state, and global policymakers have proposed and adopted a variety of approaches to regulate platform designs and their impacts, from strengthening transparency and user control of algorithmic feeds to addressing deceptive design features or requiring age verification. In the US, regulating effectively in this area requires grappling with a host of complex questions related to the First Amendment and Section 230 that will continue to be contested for years to come. Yet the existing research is only loosely connected to many ongoing policy development efforts. The maturation of policymaking in this area requires bolstering scientific consensus about which platform design changes effectively mitigate which harms, how to understand the tradeoffs, how to best measure and evaluate design changes, and other questions.
KGI is working to deepen research-to-policy connections and convene stakeholders in support of this agenda. Projects include:
Organized by the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) for Georgetown’s Tech & Society Week 2026, this panel will examine the relationship between algorithmic feed design and social and political polarization.
In-person and Livestreamed
Georgetown Capitol Campus
(500 1st St NW Washington, D.C. 20001)
10:00am ET
View this event
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As the European Commission launches its first-ever statutory review of the Digital Markets Act, KGI’s Alissa Cooper and Tracy Xu joined with a group of European and American scholars to provide a critical assessment of how the regime has performed thus far and recommendations for how implementation can be strengthened.
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The UK’s competition regulator has built solid evidence of Google’s market power in search, but its proposed interventions are not poised to address it. In recently filed comments, KGI explains that without confronting Google’s control over default distribution and sharpening its publisher and user choice rules, the Competition and Markets Authority’s proposed conduct requirements risk preserving the very market power they are meant to constrain.
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TikTok’s and Meta’s 2025 DSA risk assessments describe a range of risks and a multitude of mitigations addressing risks to minors: screentime management, parental controls, privacy-oriented design defaults, and restrictions on notifications. However, the risk assessments provide very little information about the level of risks and the effectiveness of chosen mitigations. Internal company documents released in US litigation, on the other hand, tell a different story.
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Across the EU and US, two influential digital governance regimes are producing new evidence about how large social media companies assess and respond to potential risks on their platforms. KGI’s latest report compares Meta and TikTok’s EU risk assessments with internal documents emerging from US litigation, revealing significant gaps between public claims about risk mitigation and evidence of how these risks are actually addressed.
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Governments around the world are adopting online age assurance requirements of different kinds, reshaping how digital services are accessed by adults and youth. KGI’s latest report provides a technical assessment of how age assurance systems work in practice and examines their accuracy, circumvention resistance, availability, and privacy implications.
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Algorithms determine what we read, watch, and encounter online, and, increasingly, they also influence our offline lives. Yet algorithms are often built to maximize short-term engagement and capture attention, rather than to deliver long-term value to users. KGI’s new commentary takes a deep dive into the evolving landscape of recommender system design, highlighting six innovative trends that show it is possible to design better feeds that put people first.
