Tech Accountability and Safety Data Access

The guide examines the critical need for public interest researchers to access social media data to monitor platform accountability and systemic risks. It details the current landscape of regulatory frameworks in the EU and US, identifies technological, legal, and fragmentation barriers, and categorizes the types of data required—user-generated, platform curation, and platform decision-making data—to advance collective knowledge and ensure regulatory compliance.

• Public interest researchers face significant barriers to accessing data, which hinders the ability to conduct causal research over time and complicates the peer-review process due to a lack of common data documentation and quality standards.
• Researchers encounter three primary categories of barriers: technological (such as the difficulty of searching audio/visual content or decentralised networks), legal/ethical (including platform Terms of Service and user privacy expectations), and fragmentation (where data is scattered or uses opaque, varying metrics).
• The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which entered into force in November 2022, is the first major legislation to provide researchers access to data from very large online platforms (VLOPs) with over 45 million monthly EU users to study systemic risks like disinformation and illegal hate speech.
• In the United States, several bipartisan and individual bills have been introduced to facilitate researcher access to platform data, including the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA), the Social Media DATA Act, and the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act (DSOSA).
• Some technology companies are actively restricting data access; for instance, Twitter announced in February 2023 that it would end free API access, a move critics claim could jeopardise over 250 research projects.
• The document identifies three essential types of social media data for research: user-generated data (content and behaviour), platform curation data (moderation and algorithmic sorting), and platform decision-making data (internal experiments and leadership communications).
• To comply with the GDPR when accessing personal data for research, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) suggests safeguards such as pseudonymisation, informed consent, and specific data storage and retention criteria.

APA

Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2023). Tech Accountability and Safety Data Access. https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-explainer/data-access/

Chicago

Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Tech Accountability and Safety Data Access. 2023. https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-explainer/data-access/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Institute for Strategic Dialogue |title=Tech Accountability and Safety Data Access |date=4 July 2023 |url=https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-explainer/data-access/ |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{instituteforstrategicdialogue2023tech, author = {{Institute for Strategic Dialogue}}, title = {{Tech Accountability and Safety Data Access}}, institution = {Institute for Strategic Dialogue}, year = {2023}, month = jul, url = {https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-explainer/data-access/}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }