The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) established a host of new transparency mandates for online platforms. One of the simplest yet most critical allows researchers to collect or “scrape” data that is publicly available on platforms’ websites or apps. This is the first in a series of posts about data scraping and researcher rights under the DSA. It examines who can take advantage of the DSA’s protections, comparing three categories of researchers: vetted academics who receive access to internally held platform data, the broader class of researchers who may use publicly available data, and researchers whose data collection is not covered by the DSA.
Future posts in this series will look more closely at what data these researchers may collect, given uncertainty about what online information counts as “publicly available.” They will also examine how researchers become eligible to collect data, and whether platforms themselves can serve as gatekeepers whose approval is required before researchers can collect even publicly available information. For the DSA’s data access rules to serve their intended purpose as a check on platform power and mechanism for public accountability, it will be important for researchers and regulators to arrive at shared answers to these questions.
Read the full post at Verfassungsblog