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.
Key outputs include:
Better Access: Data for the Common Good, a roadmap published in 2025 that provides a baseline framework for expanding access to high-influence public platform data – the narrow slice of public platform data that has the greatest impact on civic life due to its reach, source, or role in shaping what people see online.
KGI’s Age Assurance Rules provides practical recommendations for designing age assurance rules that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, service availability, competition, and openness.
KGI’s Assigning Responsibility for Age Assurance examines how policymakers can allocate responsibility for age assurance across the digital ecosystem. It provides practical recommendations for assigning age assurance obligations in ways that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, competition, accessibility, and openness.
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KGI’s Measuring Risk II report examines what EU risk assessments and US litigation reveal about Snap and YouTube’s approaches to risks on their platforms, with a particular focus on risks to minors. The report explores the gap between what these platforms publicly disclose about risk mitigation and what has emerged through discovery in US litigation, including their own internal research, product development, and risk evaluation.
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As lawsuits involving AI, social media, privacy, competition, and platform accountability expand worldwide, courts are emerging as central actors shaping technology governance. A new tech litigation tracker developed by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Tech Justice Law, and Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology program centralizes and tracks technology-related litigation and regulatory actions across jurisdictions and issue areas.
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As social media and generative AI chatbot lawsuits in the United States proceed to discovery and trial, courts are emerging as central actors in shaping technology governance, platform accountability, and online safety. A new report by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Tech Justice Law, and the USC Marshall School Neely Center provides a practical, evidence-based framework to help courts, litigators, and policymakers craft effective and enforceable remedies for harms associated with social media platforms and AI chatbots.
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In its first full year in operation, KGI made its mark across technology policy venues and outlets. Through expert-led, evidence-based work, KGI helped inform policy approaches to algorithmic feed design, researcher access to data, and competition enforcement in the search market – demonstrating how independent research can shape real-world decisions in the United States and Europe.
