[TheAceOfHearts]

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.

[qcnguy]

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]

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]

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

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.

[rsynnott]

> Auditors are hired by the company being audited

Not necessarily; regulatory bodies, particularly tax authorities, can and do impose auditors upon companies.

[Aerroon]

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]

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?

[bluecalm]

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.

[nradov]

It's stupid to force companies to accommodate researchers. If researchers want data then they can negotiate a paid license for it.

[deaux]

Not sure how much "It's stupid" adds to the conversation. GP made an argument.

[henry2023]

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]

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]

> 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.