The Lumen Research Sprint
Spring 2022
Takedowns and Transparency:
Global Norms, Regulation and the Nature of Online Information
In the spring of 2022, the Lumen team partnered with the Berkman Klein Center's Educational Programs team to host the 5th in the ongoing series of Berkman Klein Center "Research Sprints." These Sprints are educational initiatives with an explicitly participatory model for approaching issues that gather experts and emerging scholars to address current social, ethical, and policy concerns in digital technology on the frontiers of rapidly changing fields, from education innovation to democratic reform.
The Lumen-themed Sprint focused on developing draft statements of best practices (SOBP) in transparency for Online Service Providers (OSPs), specifically transparency regarding the takedown notices -- legal requests seeking the removal of material the OSP hosts -- that those OSPs receive. The impetus for the Sprint was the experience that the Lumen project has had over the past two decades running the Lumen Database—a repository of content takedown requests sent to OSPs.
Lumen partners with Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Medium, Automattic, and other OSPs to aggregate content takedown requests received by these OSPs. The project’s database offers opportunities to researchers, scholars, academics, journalists, and others to study patterns in content takedown requests. Various OSPs voluntarily share copies of takedown requests with Lumen, subject to each OSP's internal guidelines and shifting priorities.The lack of standardization of transparency regarding takedown requests leads not only to opacity regarding takedowns generally, but also to difficulty in understanding the ways that takedown processes broadly may be misused by individuals, organizations, and powerful institutions.
With all of this in mind the focus of this Research Sprint was the creation of draft statements of best practices for takedown transparency., aimed at the primary audience of takedown recipient OSPs, and with the larger goal of provoking a more sweeping practical conversation on the topic. Participants familiarized themselves with the nuances of the global notice and the takedown ecosystem and collaborated to produced two working drafts of a Statement of Best Practices regarding takedown transparency. These statements are intended primarily for Online Services Providers (OSP) that are the recipients of takedown notices but will also be useful for other relevant stakeholders. The draft statements will ideally become the first stage of an iterative, consultative process on takedown transparency guided by Lumen.
You can read more about the Lumen Sprint at the links below, including:
Its launch and participant cohort and its conclusion.
The Sprint's participants produced four primary documents, including two separate draft SOBPs, one from each half of the larger group, along with a documentation of the process that lead to each. Links to each are below.
Lumen welcomes inquiries regarding the SOBPs and the process that created them, especially regarding collaboration on possible next steps.
Statements of Best Practices and Related Documentation
Statement 1's Process Documentation
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Statement of Best Practices 2 and Related Process Documentation