Lumen

Archive of the takedown and removal requests sent to online platforms.

About Lumen

Lumen is a research project at the Harvard Law School Library that studies takedown notices along with other legal removal requests and demands concerning online content. The project was conceived, developed, and founded in 2002 by then-Berkman Klein Center Fellow Wendy Seltzer, and it is currently housed within Harvard Law School's Library system.

The database includes complaints of all varieties, including trademark, defamation, and privacy, domestic and international, and court orders. Voluntary submissions are provided by companies such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Meta, Medium, Vimeo, Cloudflare, and Wordpress. As of June 2026, the project hosts over seventy-five million notices, referencing over ten billion URLs.

Drafted from lumendatabase.org · not yet confirmed by Lumen

How it works

Lumen is the archive of takedown requests. Since 2001 (originally as Chilling Effects) it has collected the notices that platforms receive, mostly copyright and DMCA but also defamation, right to be forgotten and government requests. Google, Wikimedia, Twitter and others forward notices automatically. Researchers and journalists can search them, and anyone can look up why a result was removed.

If you're a platform, you can submit your own notices to Lumen for transparency. If you're doing research on takedown abuse, it's the primary dataset.