European researchers want to study social media’s harms but can’t get the data
Iamnitchi is one of several misinformation researchers who told WIRED that, despite being legally entitled to obtain platform data under EU law, they face obstacles, obfuscation, and, in some cases, court battles to obtain it. Last year the law was broadened to increase researcher access, but it’s the implementation not the scope of the law itself that researchers say is the issue.
In recent years, social media companies shut down public access tools like Meta’s CrowdTangle and replaced them with content libraries, or, like X, paywalled their API data, forcing academics to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany. Researchers say that without API access, what Iamnitchi describes as the “black holes” in what society knows about how these platforms recommend content or handle reports regarding sensitive content will only grow.
Others, like TikTok, cap how...
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