Julian Jaursch and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen | About this page | Sources and acknowledgements

Originally published in August 2023; last updated in March 2024

<aside> ❗ After all these questions, now what? Next steps for researchers

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Abbreviations

Before getting started with the questions and answers, three abbreviations are good to know (they’ll all be explained in greater detail later):

One more note: The EU flag label 🇪🇺 denotes a link to the DSA’s legal text and the information label ℹ️ offers suggestions for more in-depth reading or other sources.

Background and timeline

Why should researchers care about the DSA? What’s in it for them?

Independent regulators in the EU need expertise from academic and civil society researchers to understand online platforms. Without this, strong and sensible enforcement of new EU rules for platforms will not work. The new rules in the 🇪🇺 Digital Services Act (DSA) apply to a range of online platforms, with the goal of creating a “safe and transparent online environment” for consumers.

ℹ️ Analysis of various aspects of the DSA, edited by Joris van Hoboken et al. (Verfassungsblog ebook, 2023)

However, for years, researchers have faced obstacles when they needed online platforms’ data to explore platforms’ functioning, potential risks and effects. A plan for a one-off cooperation between a platform and researchers failed miserably, tech companies have allegedly pressured researchers to stop their work and a key tool to study platforms has been closed. In early 2023, these challenges have come to the fore again as one of the more open big platforms, Twitter, made it much harder to access data. Even when industry-academia collaboration work very well, questions around researcher independence come into play.

Against this backdrop, European policymakers – pushed by academia and civil society – included a data access provision for researchers in DSA. This article (Article 40) could potentially provide a huge opportunity for researchers to better understand platforms and, ultimately, help independent regulators oversee platforms based on scientific evidence.

Yet, despite the promises held by the DSA, many important questions remain open. Details on data access requests, the type of data to be requested, the timelines for full application and the communication exchanges between researchers, regulators and platforms will be hashed out over the coming months. That is why preparation and coordination by researchers and regulators is crucial.

ℹ️ Overview of the legal/political developments on researcher data access in the EU by Mathias Vermeulen (journal article, September 2022)

ℹ️ Why researcher data access is a key provision of the DSA by Alex Engler (Brookings blog post, January 2021)

ℹ️ Guide to the data access rules by John Albert (AlgorithmWatch blog post, December 2022)

ℹ️ Impediments to privacy research and how the DSA might help by Konrad Kollnig and Nigel Shadbolt (Technology and Regulation, October 2023)