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by TheAceOfHearts 199 days 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.
1 comments
qcnguy 196 days 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

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.

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