Abbreviations

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

DSA: Digital Services Act, a European Union law applying to online platforms throughout the EU
DSC: Digital Services Coordinator, a new regulator each EU member state has to designate that has a big role to play in enforcing the DSA, particularly regarding data access for researchers
VLOP: Very large online platform or search engine, i.e., platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU per month, which have to abide by special rules under the DSA, including the data access provisions. When speaking of platforms here, it mostly means VLOPs.

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.