European researchers want to study the harm of social media but can’t find it

Iamnitchi is one of several disinformation experts who told WIRED that, although they have the right to access platform information under EU law, they face obstacles, confusion, and, in some cases, court battles to access it. Last year the law was expanded to increase the scope of research, but it is the implementation and not the scope of the law that researchers say is the problem.

In recent years, social media companies have closed access tools like Shave and CrowdTangle is changing them and content librariesor, like X, they pay their own Data APIsforcing students to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, director of research at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany. The researchers say that without API access, what Iamnitchi describes as “black holes” in how people know how these platforms create content or how to use bug reports will only grow.

Others, like TikTok, record how many posts each search account can pull in each day, which Allen said would make it “uncountable at any level.”

Price DSA the goal was to address this by allowing researchers in trusted organizations to access API data if they could demonstrate that it would help in studying systemic threats, from illegal activities to threats to human rights. But two years after the law went into effect, researchers say they are struggling to meet its security requirements and face limited definitions from platforms of what constitutes a systemic risk.

Application forms vary by platform, but most require data to be stored on hard-to-tamper devices — such as computers connected to the Internet — which many universities don’t have, Iamnitchi said.

Even for accredited researchers, “there is no guarantee that the data is good,” said LK Seiling, the study’s coordinator. Image of DSA40a German system that tracks 46 DSA programs. The API data is often difficult for a colleague to reproduce, so the researchers’ work can’t check for errors, which Iamnitchi said is “very important for science.”

Image of DSA40 it shows that of the 46 that were followed, 20 were accepted and 14 were rejected. But the rates vary widely: TikTok approved 11 of 13 applications, while X rejected 11 of 23. The true rejection rate should be higher because the tracker relies on voluntary reports, Seiling said.

“There is no opportunity created for researchers to use this method,” Seiling said. “Getting the data as it is currently set up is trying to confuse researchers.”

A spokesperson for TikTok told WIRED that the company has given more than 1,500 research groups access to its tools, approved 130 applications in the EU in the second half of last year, and that its daily volume of 1,000 API requests allows researchers to pull more than 100,000 videos and comments per day, or record up to 2 million. TikTok said it considers its search tools to be compliant with the DSA but “wants to control people.”

A Meta spokesperson said CrowdTangle covered only a small portion of the company’s content, while the Meta Content Library and API that replaced it are “the most comprehensive search tools to date.” They cover Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Channels, and Threads with “privacy protection,” and qualified non-profit researchers, including journalists, can apply.