User-generated content (UGC) is a term used to describe media content generated by people outside of professional media institutions, often for no pay, which is made available to the public. This content can consist of text, photos, images, graphics, audio, or video and can take many forms including consumer reviews, comments on existing websites, posts on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, memes, contributions to wikis such as Wikipedia, blog posts, podcasts, citizen journalism contributions, or videos [Page 1826]shared through sites such as YouTube or LiveJournal.

In colloquial use, the term UGC is often interchanged with the term user-generated media; however, the former technically refers to individual pieces of content or texts generated by users, while the latter refers to the platforms that are ...