Access to Social Media Data for Public Interest Research: Lessons Learnt and Recommendations for Strengthening Initiatives in the EU and Beyond

The report examines the information asymmetry between social media platforms and public interest researchers, identifying technological, legal, and ethical barriers to data access. It evaluates existing mechanisms such as transparency reporting, API access, and crowdsourced data donations, while analyzing the impact of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) and GDPR. The authors recommend the creation of an independent intermediary body to vet researchers and the alignment of international standards to ensure a safe, transparent, and evidence-based approach to studying the societal impacts of digital platforms.

• Public interest research on social media is hindered by an information asymmetry where researchers depend on platforms to measure phenomena like polarization, unlike environmental science which does not depend on the oil industry to measure CO2.
• Data access barriers include technological restrictions (such as end-to-end encryption and blockchain), fragmentation where content cannot be searched systematically across a platform, and legal hurdles related to Terms of Service violations during scraping.
• Transparency reporting by companies often lacks utility because of arbitrary or unclear content categories, which can be used to present platforms in an overly positive light.
• The Social Science One project demonstrated that industry-academic partnerships can be severely delayed by privacy concerns, resulting in highly aggregated datasets with limited utility and reliability issues, such as the exclusion of a third of the US population.
• Crowdsourced data and data donations, such as Mozilla's investigations into YouTube, provide insights into real user behavior and algorithms despite platform unwillingness to share data, though they face selection and reporting biases.
• The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) introduces obligations for very large online platforms (VLOPs) to grant data access to vetted researchers to help detect and understand systemic risks.
• The GDPR provides a 'compatibility presumption' under Article 5(1)(b), which facilitates the processing of personal data for research purposes in the public interest, provided appropriate safeguards like pseudonymisation are used.
• The report recommends establishing an independent intermediary body to certify researchers and verify research quality, reducing the burden on under-resourced institutions and ensuring technical expertise in vetting.

APA

Bundtzen, S., & Schwieter, C. (2023). Access to Social Media Data for Public Interest Research: Lessons Learnt and Recommendations for Strengthening Initiatives in the EU and Beyond. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Access-to-Social-Media-Data-for-Public-Interest-Research-1.pdf

Chicago

Bundtzen, Sara, and Christian Schwieter. Access to Social Media Data for Public Interest Research: Lessons Learnt and Recommendations for Strengthening Initiatives in the EU and Beyond. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Access-to-Social-Media-Data-for-Public-Interest-Research-1.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Bundtzen |first1=Sara |last2=Schwieter |first2=Christian |title=Access to Social Media Data for Public Interest Research: Lessons Learnt and Recommendations for Strengthening Initiatives in the EU and Beyond |publisher=Institute for Strategic Dialogue |date=2023 |url=https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Access-to-Social-Media-Data-for-Public-Interest-Research-1.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{bundtzen2023access, author = {Bundtzen, Sara and Schwieter, Christian}, title = {{Access to Social Media Data for Public Interest Research: Lessons Learnt and Recommendations for Strengthening Initiatives in the EU and Beyond}}, institution = {Institute for Strategic Dialogue}, year = {2023}, url = {https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Access-to-Social-Media-Data-for-Public-Interest-Research-1.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }