About

Platform Policy Watch is a research project by Hisham Muhamed, an undergraduate researcher at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus, conducted summer 2026, tracking how online platforms and AI providers govern user data and content in their own Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and Community Guidelines.

What this site is

Every page on this site is generated directly from a Markdown wiki that quotes real policy documents verbatim, with dates and citations, never a paraphrase. The wiki itself is maintained by an LLM agent (Claude) following a fixed set of rules, reading two source datasets and extracting the clauses relevant to AI training rights, data licensing, and predatory contract language. Full technical detail, including how to reproduce or extend it, is in the project's GitHub repository.

The two source datasets

Both datasets this project uses — PGAv2 and GenGA — are published by the same source: the Platform Governance Archive (PGA), maintained by the Lab Platform Governance, Media and Technology at ZeMKI, University of Bremen, led by Christian Katzenbach. PGA publishes three sibling datasets — PGA v1 (2005–2021, not used here), PGA v2, and GenGA — all collected on the Open Terms Archive engine. GenGA is not a separate project that merely shares tooling with PGA; it is PGA's own dataset.

PGAv2 — 25 major social media, messaging, and content-sharing platforms per PGA's own count, 2022–present. Official citation: Katzenbach, C., Dergacheva, D., Fischer, A., Kopps, A., Kolesnikov, S., Redeker, D., Viejo Otero, P. (2023). Platform Governance Archive (PGA) v2 [data set]. DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/XSBPT. Used under the Open Data Commons Attribution License. The 24 platform labels actually present in this project's data (23 distinct real-world platforms — Twitter and X are the same platform, pre/post the 2023 rebrand): BeReal, Facebook, Instagram, LINE, LinkedIn, Moltbook, Parler, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Snapchat, Spotify, Telegram, Threads, TikTok, TruthSocial, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Upscrolled, WeChat, WhatsApp, X, YouTube.

GenGA ("Generative AI Governance Archive") — 11 Generative AI services per PGA's own dataset page, 2025–present, implemented as the genai-eu collection on the Open Terms Archive engine, also maintained by ZeMKI. The 11 providers, confirmed to match this project's own source data exactly: ChatGPT, Claude.ai, DeepSeek, Google Generative AI Services, Le Chat, Llama API, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Qwen Chat, and xAI (PGA's own page labels this last provider "Grok," its product name; this project uses "xAI," the developer's name — the same provider). GenGA does not have its own separate DOI-bearing citation; cite the PGA project citation above and name the GenGA dataset specifically.

Both datasets are read-only inputs; nothing in this project modifies them. See the wiki's methodology page for the full collection, extraction, and tagging process for both.

What this site is not

It has no risk-scoring formula of its own. The only risk-severity numbers shown on platform pages come from two independent, named, external tools — wearetosed and ToS;DR — shown only where those tools have real data for a given page, and always labeled as their own independent opinion, not this project's verdict.

Contact & source

Built by Hisham Muhamed. Source code, the full wiki, and reproduction instructions are on GitHub, MIT licensed.

Missing a platform or document you'd expect to see here? This wiki doesn't take direct edits — every page has to trace back to a real, verbatim-quoted source document — but you can suggest one, and it'll be added the same way every existing page was: read and extracted from the real document, not summarized.