6 ms·

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

by Aerroon 11mo ago

TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.
- nradov 11mo ago
  It's stupid to force companies to accommodate researchers. If researchers want data then they can negotiate a paid license for it.
  - deaux 11mo ago
    Not sure how much "It's stupid" adds to the conversation. GP made an argument.
    - henry2023 11mo ago
      Maybe it’s stupid in your perspective. nevertheless; nations have the right to put laws in place and enterprises willing to provide goods and services ought to follow those rules.
      - nradov 11mo ago
        And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate. These nations can do whatever they want but let's be honest about what's going on here. The law is stupid because it's forcing US tech companies to subsidize research boondoggles. They're providing bullshit jobs to useless academics who are incapable of doing any real work, and the final output will be some long reports that no one ever reads.
        disgruntledphd2 10mo ago
        > And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate. Can you help me understand how the EU is stagnant? Granted, they have lower economic growth than the US, but they're (mostly) not running large fiscal deficits. And unable to innovate is quite simply, untrue. Deepmind (you know the people that invented LLMs) were a UK based company and were purchased by Google. Spotify & Skype were also both relatively innovative. If by innovative, you mean are highly valued in the stock market above what a rational person would pay, then yeah Europe doesn't have as much "innovation". Now, if there was a single EU capital market (which honestly should be in London, despite the political complexities) then that might not be true. Also worth noting that a lot of the US market is propped up by EU/EEA investors. Like, the Norwegian oil fund owns an appreciable amount of the US stock market. What would happen if all the European money was withdrawn from the US market? Nothing good for US "innovation". And on the core point here, social media is now the public sphere, and as such is definitely worthy of investigation by academics. Like, if FB can do this (with much more personal data) then Twitter/X can do it. In fact, it would be super easy as they used to do it before Elon decided to attempt to monetise it badly. Like, most studies of social media were performed on Twitter data, precisely because of this.
- bluecalm 11mo ago
  There is a big difference between auditors and "researchers". Researchers are just academics whose incentives are to publish things and makes a name for themselves - possibly the worst group to give data access to.
- Aerroon 11mo ago
  Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data? I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.
  - TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
    I guess one point of confusion is exactly what data is shared, because I understood it to be general access to things that are already publicly available. Furthermore, X offers paid access to the same data through their enterprise API program, so you're already giving access to unrelated third parties. Is there a significant distinction between the data that researchers could access and what's available through enterprise API?
- qcnguy 11mo ago
  Auditors != researchers. Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers. "Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.
  - TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
    It's not clear what "full access to everyone's data" actually means, isn't it limited to things that are already publicly available? So for example, I don't think researchers would get access to someone's Likes because that feature is now considered private, but they could access things like Posts and Retweets. My expectation is that researchers would be allowed to run queries against publicly available data as part of their research, but they wouldn't be allowed to do a huge download with a copy of everything posted during the last 5 years. Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws, and the way that they handle researcher access is by providing carefully controlled remote environments with sandboxed access to user data, which forms the basis for my understanding of how researchers are typically provided access to social media data.
    - qcnguy 10mo ago
      It means what it says. A lot of these academics want to access people's IP addresses because they're trying to map out social networks and bot accounts, by which they mean any account they don't like the views of. So it means stripping people's anonymity under the guise of "research" and of course those academics can be trusted to immediately report everyone posting conservative views to the police, who will then arrest them and prosecute them. > Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws They have a blue check system that works in the same way as X's does, so they aren't compliant. https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-verified-creators https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-verified-creators But please understand that the EU is not a part of the world that has the rule of law. It has rule by law. Law in the EU is a vague thing, discovered as often as written, in which people who advance the EU's social plan are legal and people who oppose it are illegal. It's a system in which the EU Commission is judge, jury and executioner, and the courts are merely rubber stamps to which you can appeal if you feel like wasting money arguing in front of judges chosen for loyalty to the project over loyalty to high minded judicial principle.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
It's not "any company", it's exceptionally large platforms who can give insight into large societal questions and have enough influence to sway people's opinions. The data is technically public already, researchers could scrape it, but investigations has to be able to be done to ensure the platforms aren't used to intentionally steer people's opinion in a specific direction, since they're unable to self regulate that it seems.
- Aerroon 11mo ago
  But governments themselves can steer people's opinions just fine? Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?
  - squigz 11mo ago
    Are those emails already public?
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    No, they cannot. And yes, in some countries you can request that if you have a reason for it.
  - Zigurd 11mo ago
    > Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"? In the US that's called an FOIA. It could include their personal devices if they use them for work communication. It's not limited to research purposes.
alephnerd 11mo ago
A lot of people seem to be forgetting that the Cambridge Analytica scandal started off with data that was supposed to be used for research projects at the University of Cambridge being exfiltrated for commercial political use [0]. That said, this is most likely a tit-for-tat by the EU against the Trump administration, because we live in a world where all countries (even the US) have now weaponized regulations for negotiating leverage. Our red line in both the Biden admin as well as the current admin was the DSA. The EU's red line is not being included in any negotiation over the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. The US fights against the DSA by arguing about infringement on free speech. The EU then tries to fight back over market competition. And it goes on and on and on. This is why a lot of businesses get antsy about trade wars. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
  They could implement a similar system to what Facebook currently provides when doing research with platform data. I think they only allow access to carefully controlled data through a remote sandboxed environment. I think Twitter is already providing access to this data through paid APIs too, so this is effectively subsidizing researcher access.
  - alephnerd 11mo ago
    Probably, but as I mentioned before, the EU has been using the DSA as a negotiating tool against the US - just like we are using Free Speech absolutism and "censorship" as a tool against the EU in negotiations. Unlike other major tech companies like Meta or Alphabet that fall under the DSA, X doesn't have a similar presence in the EU to give it a firewall. Alphabet has Poland on it's side [0], Meta has Ireland on it's side [1], Amazon has Luxembourg on it's side [2], and Microsoft has Czechia on it's side [7][8][9], and because of Musk's ties to the GOP, it becomes a useful political lever while not directly hurting individual EU states. If X somehow complies, some other issue will crop up against (eg.) Tesla despite the Gigafactory because Brandenburg is a lost cause if you aren't affilated with the AfD or BSW. It's the same reason why X doesn't push back when India passes a diktat because Indian law holds corporate leaders criminally liable and X has a significant India presence [10] It's the same way how if you want to hold Germany by the balls you pressure Volkswagen [3] and if you want to pressure France [4] you target LVMH's cognac, scotch, and wine business [5]. This is a major reason why companies try to build GCCs abroad as well - being in the same room gives some leverage when negotiating regulations. Hence why Czechia, Finland, Luxembourg, and Greece pushed back against French attempts at cloud sovereignty [6] because OVHCloud only has a presence in France and Poland, but Amazon and Microsoft have large capital presences in the other 4. [0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions-in-polands-digital-future https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions... [1] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/irish-privacy-regulator-picks-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-third-commissioner/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/irish-privacy-regulator-picks-... [2] - https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/amazon-leaders-meet-luxembourg-prime-minister-luc-frieden-in-seattle https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/amazon-leaders-meet-l... [3] - https://www.ft.com/content/6ec91d4a-2f37-4a01-9132-6c7ae5b06d5d https://www.ft.com/content/6ec91d4a-2f37-4a01-9132-6c7ae5b06... [4] - https://videos.senat.fr/video.5409997_682ddabf64695.aides-aux-grandes-entreprises--audition-de-bernard-arnault https://videos.senat.fr/video.5409997_682ddabf64695.aides-au... [5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/eu-fight-against-trump-s-tariffs-is-blunted-by-corporate-lobbying https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/eu-fight-... [6] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-digital-ministers-push-against-cloud-sovereignty-definition-that-would-block-us/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-digital-ministers-push-agai... [7] - https://nukib.gov.cz/en/infoservis-en/news/2276-nukib-and-microsoft-confirm-cybersecurity-cooperation-by-signing-a-memorandum/ https://nukib.gov.cz/en/infoservis-en/news/2276-nukib-and-mi... [8] - https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2017/03/31/satya-nadella-visits-central-eastern-europe/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2017/03/31/satya-nadella-v... [9] - https://mpo.gov.cz/en/guidepost/for-the-media/press-releases/microsoft-launches-ai-national-skilling-plan-in-the-czech-republic-in-the-first-phase-of-the-project--it-will-invest-over-czk-10-million-in-training---288303/ https://mpo.gov.cz/en/guidepost/for-the-media/press-releases... [10] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Location/X-Bengaluru-Location-EI_IE100569.0,1_IL.2,11_IC2940587.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Location/X-Bengaluru-Location-EI_I...
0815beck 11mo ago
why? what seems bizarre to me is that platforms of such whitespread use and public interest can be bought and ruined by some random person
Quothling 11mo ago
It's because X is denying researchers access to public data. Data which can be used to detect scams and illegal advertising. It's really a consumer protection fine, but this article explains it better. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/eu-fines-x-140-mln-breaching-online-content-rules-tiktok-settles-with-2025-12-05/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

by Aerroon 11mo ago

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.

nradov 11mo ago
It's stupid to force companies to accommodate researchers. If researchers want data then they can negotiate a paid license for it.
- deaux 11mo ago
  Not sure how much "It's stupid" adds to the conversation. GP made an argument.
  - henry2023 11mo ago
    Maybe it’s stupid in your perspective. nevertheless; nations have the right to put laws in place and enterprises willing to provide goods and services ought to follow those rules.
    - nradov 11mo ago
      And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate. These nations can do whatever they want but let's be honest about what's going on here. The law is stupid because it's forcing US tech companies to subsidize research boondoggles. They're providing bullshit jobs to useless academics who are incapable of doing any real work, and the final output will be some long reports that no one ever reads.
      - disgruntledphd2 10mo ago
        > And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate. Can you help me understand how the EU is stagnant? Granted, they have lower economic growth than the US, but they're (mostly) not running large fiscal deficits. And unable to innovate is quite simply, untrue. Deepmind (you know the people that invented LLMs) were a UK based company and were purchased by Google. Spotify & Skype were also both relatively innovative. If by innovative, you mean are highly valued in the stock market above what a rational person would pay, then yeah Europe doesn't have as much "innovation". Now, if there was a single EU capital market (which honestly should be in London, despite the political complexities) then that might not be true. Also worth noting that a lot of the US market is propped up by EU/EEA investors. Like, the Norwegian oil fund owns an appreciable amount of the US stock market. What would happen if all the European money was withdrawn from the US market? Nothing good for US "innovation". And on the core point here, social media is now the public sphere, and as such is definitely worthy of investigation by academics. Like, if FB can do this (with much more personal data) then Twitter/X can do it. In fact, it would be super easy as they used to do it before Elon decided to attempt to monetise it badly. Like, most studies of social media were performed on Twitter data, precisely because of this.
bluecalm 11mo ago
There is a big difference between auditors and "researchers". Researchers are just academics whose incentives are to publish things and makes a name for themselves - possibly the worst group to give data access to.
Aerroon 11mo ago
Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data? I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.
- TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
  I guess one point of confusion is exactly what data is shared, because I understood it to be general access to things that are already publicly available. Furthermore, X offers paid access to the same data through their enterprise API program, so you're already giving access to unrelated third parties. Is there a significant distinction between the data that researchers could access and what's available through enterprise API?
qcnguy 11mo ago
Auditors != researchers. Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers. "Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.
- TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
  It's not clear what "full access to everyone's data" actually means, isn't it limited to things that are already publicly available? So for example, I don't think researchers would get access to someone's Likes because that feature is now considered private, but they could access things like Posts and Retweets. My expectation is that researchers would be allowed to run queries against publicly available data as part of their research, but they wouldn't be allowed to do a huge download with a copy of everything posted during the last 5 years. Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws, and the way that they handle researcher access is by providing carefully controlled remote environments with sandboxed access to user data, which forms the basis for my understanding of how researchers are typically provided access to social media data.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    It means what it says. A lot of these academics want to access people's IP addresses because they're trying to map out social networks and bot accounts, by which they mean any account they don't like the views of. So it means stripping people's anonymity under the guise of "research" and of course those academics can be trusted to immediately report everyone posting conservative views to the police, who will then arrest them and prosecute them. > Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws They have a blue check system that works in the same way as X's does, so they aren't compliant. https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-verified-creators https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-verified-creators But please understand that the EU is not a part of the world that has the rule of law. It has rule by law. Law in the EU is a vague thing, discovered as often as written, in which people who advance the EU's social plan are legal and people who oppose it are illegal. It's a system in which the EU Commission is judge, jury and executioner, and the courts are merely rubber stamps to which you can appeal if you feel like wasting money arguing in front of judges chosen for loyalty to the project over loyalty to high minded judicial principle.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

It's not "any company", it's exceptionally large platforms who can give insight into large societal questions and have enough influence to sway people's opinions. The data is technically public already, researchers could scrape it, but investigations has to be able to be done to ensure the platforms aren't used to intentionally steer people's opinion in a specific direction, since they're unable to self regulate that it seems.

Aerroon 11mo ago
But governments themselves can steer people's opinions just fine? Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?
- squigz 11mo ago
  Are those emails already public?
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  No, they cannot. And yes, in some countries you can request that if you have a reason for it.
- Zigurd 11mo ago
  > Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"? In the US that's called an FOIA. It could include their personal devices if they use them for work communication. It's not limited to research purposes.

alephnerd 11mo ago

A lot of people seem to be forgetting that the Cambridge Analytica scandal started off with data that was supposed to be used for research projects at the University of Cambridge being exfiltrated for commercial political use [0]. That said, this is most likely a tit-for-tat by the EU against the Trump administration, because we live in a world where all countries (even the US) have now weaponized regulations for negotiating leverage. Our red line in both the Biden admin as well as the current admin was the DSA. The EU's red line is not being included in any negotiation over the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. The US fights against the DSA by arguing about infringement on free speech. The EU then tries to fight back over market competition. And it goes on and on and on. This is why a lot of businesses get antsy about trade wars. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
They could implement a similar system to what Facebook currently provides when doing research with platform data. I think they only allow access to carefully controlled data through a remote sandboxed environment. I think Twitter is already providing access to this data through paid APIs too, so this is effectively subsidizing researcher access.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  Probably, but as I mentioned before, the EU has been using the DSA as a negotiating tool against the US - just like we are using Free Speech absolutism and "censorship" as a tool against the EU in negotiations. Unlike other major tech companies like Meta or Alphabet that fall under the DSA, X doesn't have a similar presence in the EU to give it a firewall. Alphabet has Poland on it's side [0], Meta has Ireland on it's side [1], Amazon has Luxembourg on it's side [2], and Microsoft has Czechia on it's side [7][8][9], and because of Musk's ties to the GOP, it becomes a useful political lever while not directly hurting individual EU states. If X somehow complies, some other issue will crop up against (eg.) Tesla despite the Gigafactory because Brandenburg is a lost cause if you aren't affilated with the AfD or BSW. It's the same reason why X doesn't push back when India passes a diktat because Indian law holds corporate leaders criminally liable and X has a significant India presence [10] It's the same way how if you want to hold Germany by the balls you pressure Volkswagen [3] and if you want to pressure France [4] you target LVMH's cognac, scotch, and wine business [5]. This is a major reason why companies try to build GCCs abroad as well - being in the same room gives some leverage when negotiating regulations. Hence why Czechia, Finland, Luxembourg, and Greece pushed back against French attempts at cloud sovereignty [6] because OVHCloud only has a presence in France and Poland, but Amazon and Microsoft have large capital presences in the other 4. [0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions-in-polands-digital-future https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions... [1] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/irish-privacy-regulator-picks-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-third-commissioner/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/irish-privacy-regulator-picks-... [2] - https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/amazon-leaders-meet-luxembourg-prime-minister-luc-frieden-in-seattle https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/amazon-leaders-meet-l... [3] - https://www.ft.com/content/6ec91d4a-2f37-4a01-9132-6c7ae5b06d5d https://www.ft.com/content/6ec91d4a-2f37-4a01-9132-6c7ae5b06... [4] - https://videos.senat.fr/video.5409997_682ddabf64695.aides-aux-grandes-entreprises--audition-de-bernard-arnault https://videos.senat.fr/video.5409997_682ddabf64695.aides-au... [5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/eu-fight-against-trump-s-tariffs-is-blunted-by-corporate-lobbying https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/eu-fight-... [6] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-digital-ministers-push-against-cloud-sovereignty-definition-that-would-block-us/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-digital-ministers-push-agai... [7] - https://nukib.gov.cz/en/infoservis-en/news/2276-nukib-and-microsoft-confirm-cybersecurity-cooperation-by-signing-a-memorandum/ https://nukib.gov.cz/en/infoservis-en/news/2276-nukib-and-mi... [8] - https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2017/03/31/satya-nadella-visits-central-eastern-europe/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2017/03/31/satya-nadella-v... [9] - https://mpo.gov.cz/en/guidepost/for-the-media/press-releases/microsoft-launches-ai-national-skilling-plan-in-the-czech-republic-in-the-first-phase-of-the-project--it-will-invest-over-czk-10-million-in-training---288303/ https://mpo.gov.cz/en/guidepost/for-the-media/press-releases... [10] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Location/X-Bengaluru-Location-EI_IE100569.0,1_IL.2,11_IC2940587.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Location/X-Bengaluru-Location-EI_I...

0815beck 11mo ago

why? what seems bizarre to me is that platforms of such whitespread use and public interest can be bought and ruined by some random person

Quothling 11mo ago

It's because X is denying researchers access to public data. Data which can be used to detect scams and illegal advertising. It's really a consumer protection fine, but this article explains it better. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/eu-fines-x-140-mln-breaching-online-content-rules-tiktok-settles-with-2025-12-05/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...