Glossary of Platform Law and Policy Terms
Cynthia Khoo is an Associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, where she leads on worker surveillance and the civil rights implications of commercial data practices, including algorithmic discrimination. She is a Canadian technology and human rights lawyer who joined the Center after accumulating years of experience in technology law, policy, research, and advocacy with various digital rights NGOs and through her sole practice law firm. Cynthia is also a fellow at the Citizen Lab (University of Toronto). She holds a J.D. from the University of Victoria and an LL.M. from the University of Ottawa.
Author: Cynthia Khoo User-generated content (UGC) is not a new term in the context of digital platforms but rather was popularized in the earlier days of Internet intermediaries becoming popularized as mainstream spaces online, where users could congregate to connect and form communities, engage in forum discussions and other types of online dialogue, and share their writing, art, music,… Continue reading User-Generated Content
Author: Cynthia Khoo Human review is a term specific to the field of content moderation, or how digital platforms manage, curate, regulate, police, or otherwise make and enforce decisions regarding what kind of content is permitted to remain on the platform, and with what degree of reach or prominence, and what content must be removed,… Continue reading Human Review
Authors: Yasmin Curzi and Cynthia Khoo Harm is the result of words, actions (or even inactions) that cause physical, emotional, or psychological damage to someone, including violence, defamation, or economic loss. This extends to potentially non-tangible damage, including driving a person or group of people to fear for their physical, emotional, or psychological safety, experience anxiousness, limit their… Continue reading Harm (Online Harm)
Author: Cynthia Khoo ‘Flagging’ is a common “mechanism for reporting offensive content to a social media platform” (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016) or other digital platforms, and refers to the act itself of clicking or otherwise demarcating that a specific social media post, link, video, or other content should be removed or reviewed by the platform.… Continue reading Flagging
Author: Cynthia Khoo ‘Coordinated inauthentic behavior’ (CIB) is a term frequently associated with concepts such as disinformation, online misinformation, computational propaganda, and the mass leveraging of bots or fake accounts to carry out a particular set of actions or disseminate particular messages across social media platforms. The term originated with Facebook, which has defined CIB as “domestic, non-government… Continue reading Coordinated inauthentic behavior
Author: Cynthia Khoo See ‘flagging’. ‘Coordinated flagging’ refers to a form of the large-scale organized campaign where a group of individuals decides to simultaneously flag the social media content of a specific individual or specific group of individuals, marking such content as offensive, with the purpose of having the impacted individual(s) banned or suspended from the platform,… Continue reading Coordinated Flagging