KGI focuses on expanding access to public platform data so that researchers, policymakers, and the public can better understand how platforms affect individuals, communities, and societies. By leveraging the research community’s experience with different forms of data access, KGI works to drive practical and policy changes that strengthen transparency and accountability.
Access to public data about online discourse – the reach of viral posts, the spread of information, and so much more – is essential for accountability and informed public conversations. Public data access enables independent research and investigation, informs evidence-based policymaking, and advances collective understanding about the role of online platforms in our lives.
For over a decade, stakeholders both inside and outside platform companies have debated forms of transparency from digital platforms. Thanks to transparency advocates, we have seen various transparency regimes take hold – voluntary, self-regulatory, and regulatory – requiring platforms to share information about their activities, algorithms, and processes with vetted entities including researchers, regulators, or business competitors, and sometimes with the broader public. At the same time, some organizations and individuals have extensive experience independently collecting and analyzing public platform data.
Yet the tools that once allowed researchers, journalists, and civil society to study these platforms are disappearing, undermining transparency and accountability. Platforms restrict researcher access while public data is monetized for advertisers, data brokers, and AI training. This imbalance – where companies profit but independent researchers are left in the dark – undermines transparency and weakens oversight.
KGI is focused on public access to public platform data as a means to enable any interested party to understand the relationships between online platforms and individuals, communities, and societies. Our work on public data access advances practical and policy changes that expand our ability to understand the online information ecosystem. Learn more about the Expert Working Group on Public Platform Data.
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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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.
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Model legislation published by the Knight-Georgetown Institute provides a pathway for lawmakers who want to encourage better algorithmic feeds that put users’ interests front and center.
