KGI is advancing collaboration between litigators pursuing cases against online platforms, researchers, and legal scholars to strengthen platform accountability through litigation. In collaboration with partners, KGI develops practical resources and tools to support litigators in shaping discovery and remedies, while also mapping how empirical research factors into judicial processes. This work helps inform platform design litigation and advances future scholarship, policy, and technology design.
Litigation is a battleground for platform accountability worldwide. A surge of lawsuits now targets the design choices behind online platforms—from extended use features and algorithmic manipulation to privacy violations. Many of these cases are employing legal theories grounded in consumer protection and product liability to attempt to make platforms answerable for their design decisions. As US lawsuits advance to critical discovery and remedy phases, there is a growing need to foster collaboration between three communities whose work sits at the intersection of platform design and the law: litigators, technology researchers, and legal scholars.
KGI has two litigation-oriented projects: Litigating Platform Design and Empirical Research in Tech Litigation.
KGI is working with the Tech Justice Law Project and the USC Neely Center to build a network of collaborators to develop practical resources and tools for direct use by litigators as they shape their approaches to discovery and remedy. Our joint Litigating Platform Design initiative seeks to bridge the gap between litigators, technology researchers, and legal scholars through empirical research, learning, convening, and development of model resources to bolster accountability strategies.
The Litigating Platform Design initiative is focused on three critical phases of litigation:
Through research, stakeholder interviews, interdisciplinary convenings, and the development of model resources, the initiative informs litigation strategies, expands access to data and evidence, facilitates empirically-grounded design reforms, and catalyzes sustained collaboration across disciplines. While Litigating Platform Design is focused on the litigation context in the US, lessons and learning are relevant for emerging litigation in other jurisdictions, including the UK, Europe, East Africa, and beyond. Ultimately, this work seeks to help ensure that litigation plays a transformative role in safeguarding the public from potential harms of digital platform design.
KGI and Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) program are collaborating on a multi-year interdisciplinary research project to understand how empirical research is used in technology litigation in the US. Amid ongoing debates about platform design and online harms, this research project is mapping how and under what circumstances empirical evidence informs legal arguments and judicial reasoning in technology policy litigation in select cases.
As courts consider cases related to addictive design, consumer protection, age verification, and digital platform regulation, this project will map how empirical evidence informs legal arguments and judicial reasoning in technology policy litigation in select cases.
Key research questions include:
This project seeks to clarify the role of empirical research in judicial processes and inform future scholarship, policy, and design related to platform accountability. The project is part of KGI’s broader effort to strengthen platform accountability by increasing the use of empirical evidence in litigation through collaboration among litigators, technology researchers, and legal scholars.
Learn more here.
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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This year’s Digital Competition Conference brought together researchers, policymakers, businesses, litigators, and civil society experts from over 37 countries to explore the latest lessons, challenges, and opportunities in regulating and enforcing competition in digital markets.
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As governments around the world move to require age assurance online, attention is growing around whether and how these mechanisms can be implemented accurately and effectively. Recently proposed rules from the New York Office of the Attorney General represent the most significant effort to date by a US public authority to operationalize an age assurance mandate. KGI’s comments on the proposed rules recommend improvements to make them more technically sound and to better account for privacy and service availability.
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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.
