Comment by gspencley
5 months ago
I also don't like this ruling from a moral point of view. I know others may disagree with me, because we obviously all value scientific research here and a lot of us don't really like social media in general, but the fact that you want to research something and that the results of that research will have value to others doesn't entitle you to someone else's services.
I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).
Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
If it's fantastic then it would be worth starting an insurance company that gives that info, and eat the market. Nothing's stopping that right now.
That assumes all good ideas naturally translate into viable business models, but markets don’t always work that way. Consumers don’t always have the information, leverage, or incentive to push for things like transparency—especially in industries where companies benefit from opacity.
Not everything that’s good in a broader sense aligns with what businesses are incentivized to do. The absence of a transparency-first company doesn’t prove there’s no demand—it just shows that the market structure doesn’t naturally reward it.
On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
For me this all comes down to people have rights and organizations have privileges to operate granted by the society you are wanting to operate in. If you operated a company on an island where nobody was effected, I could see the argument of the parent. But as soon as you say hay I am going to offer x to these people, then you are operating under a set of rules that are determined by the society you operate in.