Comment by qwertox
5 months ago
> At the heart of this case was the enforcement of a new legal provision under the DSA: the right to access research data (Article 40(12) DSA). This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks. The lawsuit has also helped clarify open legal questions regarding the judicial enforceability of this right in Germany. [0]
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
[0] https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.
"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.
"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.
Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
I dunno. There's an argument to be made that information which one could obtain piecemeal being made easily accessible at mass scale can create a qualitatively different situation to one in which significant labor is required to acquire it.
It's not a perfect analogy, but we can consider the case of recording in public being legal and the majority of people feeling this is reasonable, versus people's gradient of unease with uniquitous CCTV surveillance, versus how people would feel if the government made sure a law that all CCTV cameras are made remotely accessible at all times.
How convenient does the law say that it has to be?
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We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.
As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.
And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.
> a power "researchers" should have.
Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.
> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.
> are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education
I agree chucklingly that the statistical overrepresentation of lawyers in parliaments fits this assessment pretty well
All the words you deemed imprecise are explicitly defined at length in the relevant act.
Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.
> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.
Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.
Could they use this to get at X data to train LLMs?
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.
> systemic risks
Is the key phrase here.
Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.
And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
One possible counterargument is that bad actors could use the data to improve their spamming or astroturfing methods.
Security by obscurity?
Not exactly: in the security space, we have better tools available than obscurity. But in the spam/abuse prevention space, obscurity is the best you can do.
It's public data already.
But it's behind certain controls such as rate limits and other anti-abuse techniques, hence the researchers' difficulty, right?
They bought the place already.
If that is the case, having researchers perform analysis makes it possible to identify that risk and that is yet another reason to make sure that public data is not obscured.
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
Counterargument it is, but its pretty weak considering benefits to free society
I agree that this seems like a net positive to me overall.
I mean ... have you been on X recently? The bad actors don't need any help.
I think Elon is still working hard to get rid of the bots, just like OJ spent years looking for the real killer.
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> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
In normal democracies searching through records require a court order.
Through private/personal records. This is not the case here.
personally i think it is akin to slavery when compelling people to take certain behaviors.
corporations aren't people, but i could see some people applying that argument in this case.
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Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
Which researchers, and why do they have such a "right"?
Because that is what is democratically voted for? If the people (or the representatives they voted for) say that society having access to that data is what society wants, then the company can either provide that data, or have it taken from them.
There should not be a scenario where a company "beats" society.
Almost all of the countries we label as "democracies" have constitutions, and many of those constitutions limit what can be "democratically voted for". In the United States, the constitution has strict limits on ceaseing private property. That does not mean the US is not "democratic" by common usage of the term. Those living in democracies that thus protect private property rights may find laws that encroach on those private property rights odd, and be against them. Even in a country that has no such protections, one may be against such laws.
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Let’s not pretend anybody voted directly for this or was even aware of this law when they cast their vote.
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> government has any right to data owned by a private company
Another way to look at it is that the people have a right to the data.
No, each person has a right to their own data. But not "the people", it is the opposite actually.
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So the people have a right to have access to other individuals personal data?
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To the extent we’re talking about user activity on the site, the people already have access to this data by dint of being the ones who did the things. Sent a tweet, viewed a tweet, clicked a link. They already have it. So what is being asked of X?
The scope is limited to electoral debates. It's in the interest of the citizens.
This is giving random researchers ("including those affiliated with non-profit bodies, organizations, and associations") "unrestricted access to all publicly available data on the platform immediately after elections" as long as they are doing something with some connection to the election? Doesn't sound very limited in scope... just timing. There's tons of nefarious uses for data like that which is why social media APIs usually have limitations on how broad you can go.
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This law is not about arbitrary companies, but about large social networks affecting millions of people. Requiring a certain transparency from these seems justified.
Is such data owned by the platform in EU?
There are vanishingly few private companies of significant size. For example in the US most businesses with more than a few owners are government chartered corporations, LLCs, and the like. This gets them government granted liability shields, and so it makes sense for them to be proactively regulated to prevent causing foreseeable harm that they might otherwise escape responsibility for.
Every once in a while, someone posts a revealing insight into exactly why Business Organizations should be taught outside law schools.
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> What is a large online platform?
The text actually says "very large online platform" which is defined in 33(1):
> This Section shall apply to online platforms and online search engines which have a number of average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union equal to or higher than 45 million, and which are designated as very large online platforms or very large online search engines pursuant to paragraph 4.
Paragraph 4 just reiterates that. Paragraph 3 gives scope for adjustment:
> In such a case, it shall adjust the number so that it corresponds to 10 % of the Union’s population in the year in which it adopts the delegated act, rounded up or down to allow the number to be expressed in millions.
Basically "very large" -> 10% of the EU population. I'm not a lawyer, though; there may well be specific legal shenanigans going on but at first blush, it doesn't look like it.
>If it's publicly available, you don't need to provide any access to it, it's available.
The data may be publicly available, but there may be anti-scraping measures.
> Last, but probably the main thing that triggers me is that it "requires" somebody do some work for free. Why the fuck any company or person must do any work, that it doesn't deem necessary, to satisfy the curiosity of some "researchers"?
In democratic countries, there are many instances where you are required to do work for free to remain in business. You have to maintain accounts, records, licenses, authorisations, inspections, etc, depending on your business. This is a necessary part of engaging with the State in which you operate.