Terms of use (TOUs) are among the most prolific contracts in human history, governing digital rights at societal scale. Yet their evolution over time is less examined, and public data is scarce.
As part of the Media Structures and Platform Governance seminar, on 26 May 2026, Prof. Tim R Samples (University of Georgia) joined us to introduce the Longitudinal Digital Terms Corpus (LDT Corpus), a comprehensive time series of 861 TOUs from 50 prominent digital platforms spanning 1999 to 2025. Drawing on corpus linguistics and natural language processing, this project shows patterns of change and convergence in the corpus.
The talk highlighted interdisciplinary research connections, including: (a) linguistic analysis, e.g., the complexity of TOUs; (b) consumer psychology, e.g., user trust and perceptions of plain-language summaries in TOUs; and (c) the implications of arbitration tactics for strategic communication.
This research resonates strongly with the mission of the Platform Governance Archive (PGA), which is hosted by the Platform Governance, Media and Technology Lab (PGMT) at ZeMKI. Like the LDT Corpus, the PGA provides public access to policy documents from major digital platforms and generative AI services, offering a crucial long-term perspective on platform governance.