Online platforms once gave researchers broad access to data through academic application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling vital work on systemic risks from disinformation to child safety while spurring novel data collection methodologies and even fields of study. As the value of web data has grown, this access has been withdrawn.
New regulation, led by the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), has formally enshrined researcher access to platform data in law, charging researchers with the duty of uncovering systemic risks to its citizens. The UK and Switzerland have also signaled that they are developing similar frameworks. Though rights are in place, and grassroots efforts to track responses from platforms to researcher data access requests are underway, the siloed nature of research makes it difficult to evaluate the new rights’ effectiveness.
In this report, we argue that a fundamental shift from regulatory process to regulatory infrastructure is needed. Researchers cannot replicate the sophisticated data pipelines that platforms maintain, but they can pool effort around common standards and shared tools to make access rights effective.
