Onlinecensorship.org seeks to encourage social media companies to operate with greater transparency and accountability toward their users as they make decisions that regulate speech. We’re collecting reports from users in an effort to shine a light on what content is taken down, why companies make certain decisions about content, and how content takedowns are affecting communities of users around the world.

WHO WE ARE

Onlinecensorship.org is a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Visualizing Impact. It was founded in 2012 by Ramzi Jaber and Jillian C. York, both of whom had begun to notice posts disappearing from their friends’ Facebook pages.

One particular story inspired them to action: popular band Coldplay posted a link to OneWorld’s song “Freedom for Palestine”, a multi-artist collaboration, generating nearly 7,000 largely supportive comments. Then, suddenly, the link disappeared, leading to accusations that the band had taken it down due to criticism. As it turned out, it wasn’t Coldplay that removed the link , but Facebook, after it was reported as “abusive” by scores of users.

The lack of recourse for such takedowns led to the creation of Onlinecensorship.org, a platform where users of social media sites can report content takedowns. In 2014, we won the Knight News Challenge on the topic of strengthening the Internet for free expression and innovation and were finally able to move the project forward.