What is onlinecensorship?

Onlinecensorship is a web application built to track and document cases of content removal and account suspension across major social media platforms. It serves as a central record where people can report when their posts or accounts have been taken down, helping shed light on how and why companies like Facebook, Twitter, and others moderate speech. The project is a Ruby on Rails application, which is a popular framework for building database-driven websites. It uses MySQL to store its data. The setup instructions in the README are aimed at developers who want to run the project locally, either using Docker, a tool that packages an app and its dependencies together, or by installing Ruby and MySQL directly on their machine. Once running, the app is accessible through a browser, and it comes with a built-in admin interface for managing the platform. The likely users of this project are researchers, journalists, and advocacy organizations focused on digital rights and free expression. For example, a researcher studying how often Facebook removes posts about political protests could use the collected data to identify trends or potential bias. A journalist writing about inconsistent enforcement of community guidelines could pull real examples from the platform to support their story. The project gives these professionals a structured way to gather and analyze censorship reports that would otherwise be scattered or lost. The README is limited to setup instructions and does not go into detail about the features, the user-facing interface, or how reports are collected and verified. What is notable is that the project is open source and designed to be self-hosted, meaning an organization can run its own instance and maintain control over the data. The inclusion of default admin credentials suggests it is intended as a starting point that organizations would customize and secure before using in production.