What community guidelines talk about

The topics

The 37 topics the map falls into, with the theme each belongs to, the number of passages (every version since 2022) and how many of the nine platforms write about it. Pick a topic to list its passages.

How the map was made

1. The rules. Every archived version of the nine platforms' Community Guidelines since 2022, from Open Terms Archive's Platform Governance Archive, filled in with Wayback Machine captures, cut into passages: a section, or a chunk of about 200 words.
2. Meaning as numbers. Each passage turned into a vector by Google's EmbeddingGemma 2, an open embedding model, with its clustering prompt.
3. Every version on the map. Each version of a passage has its own dot, so a rule that was reworded over time shows up several times, close together. When finding the topics, though, near-identical versions of the same platform's passage (cosine similarity of 0.95 or more) count once, so platforms with long, often-edited rulebooks do not tilt them.
4. Subject, not house style. Each platform's average vector is taken out, so passages group by what they are about rather than by how a platform writes ("Policy rationale", "What happens if…").
5. Topics. BERTopic: UMAP places the passages in two dimensions, HDBSCAN finds the groups and c-TF-IDF their keywords. I named the 37 topics by hand and grouped them into 12 themes; passages between groups are "Unassigned".

• The map shows what the rules talk about, and how much, not what platforms enforce.
• Distances are approximate. Two dots far apart can still share a sentence, and a topic can sit in more than one place.
• Dates are when the archive first and last captured a passage, usually within days of the real change. Passages from the first capture may be older.
• Some passages cover more than one subject; each counts wholly for one topic.
• The timelapse shows, month by month, the passages in the archived versions of each platform's rules. It starts with each platform's first capture: July 2022 for most, October and November 2022 for X, YouTube and Reddit, March 2024 for Bluesky and Truth Social. Before that the archive has no record, which does not mean the platform had no rules.