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1. Introduction
Over the last 20 years, social media has exploded as a topic of interest and a word incorporated in people’s vocabulary, including scholars (see Figure 1), while user-generated content, or simply UGC, remained perhaps more of a niche term, more commonly adopted on areas such as computer and information science, communication, business, management and tourism, among others (Figure 2).
Nevertheless, the very proliferation of social media paves the way to the normalization of the possibility of making self-created content widely available (though obviously not necessarily it will be seen, shared or liked) bypassing to a great extent some sort of editorship. I propose that it is time to redefine UGC to take into account such scenario.
The user-generated information systems or UGIS (DesAutels, 2011) are mostly modeled to a great extent to pursue a “platform” approach (Gillespie, 2010) where they are allegedly neutral structures that operate as a-political mediators to the publication and diffusion of content. It is true that there is an ongoing debate to content moderation and platforms' responsibility over issues such as hate speech, disinformation and so on. Still, the scale of content created and published by users, be it quality content, junk, entertaining, disinformation and so on, means scholars are irrevocably called to deal with it, and in order to do so effectively, the underlying concepts must be agreed upon.
This research departs from a literature review of the 20 first results of the exact query “user-generated content” on Google Scholar from 1999 to 2019, sorted by relevance, using an incognito browser (unlogged) to avoid algorithmic bias. It would seem plausible, though, that indexes such as Google Scholar would tend to assign more relevance to older, more cited research – actually the “newer” publication with these criteria was 2012. Thus, in order to include updated research results, an alert was set on Google Scholar with the query UGC OR “user generated content” from April 2015 to April 2017. The overall resulting sample was screened and used as snowballing to find other relevant work that either defines UGC or operationalizes it, resulting in a total sample of 61 articles. Building on that collection of papers, I propose an updated definition of UGC that contemplates current media environments, where...