> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I was under the impression that the Cambridge Analytica situation was largely about 1: private data, 2: exclusive access to that private data, and 3: the secrecy about that data-sharing even happening in the first place.
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
Publicly known public access to public information and facebook secretly selling private information to private company are massively far from each other.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that the Mueller report was a thing and this type of research is fairly critical in ensuring there’s no foul play in elections from foreign interests.
Foreign interests are always interfering in US elections (and everyone else's too); that's the price of being a democracy. It's a tale as old as democracy itself. There are plenty of other notable examples in US history, but it's a constant, and efforts obviously only intensified in the post-war era as America became more important to everyone else.
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
It is basically impossible to have anonymized social media data that cannot be deanonymized which is also useful for anything but a very narrow kind of research.
That's not at all true. This has nothing to do with the government. It's a court ruling on a law passed by parliament. In no way was the opinion/side of government at play here.
I think you're interpreting that that's the only outcome?
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
Not really.
6k euros are only for taking court's time and flat-rate lawyers salary.
(Imagine, in Europe average person may sue tech giants!)
If x will not comply it will be forced, maybe even by some sort of receivership.
The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
> The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
"Other platforms have granted us access to systematically track public debates on their platforms, but X has refused to do so," said DRI's Michael Meyer-Resende in a statement on Wednesday, announcing the lawsuit.
Thinking about the probable next steps made me remember that time Germany temporarily prohibited wikipedia.de from pointing to the actual Wikipedia when an article there said that the German politician Lutz Heilmann had been a full-time Stasi (the infamous and insanely brutal secret police) employee in the former DDR.
Interesting that a single cranky ex-Stasi employee can block Wikipedia for all of Germany because he's mad that Wikipedia states the proven fact that he is a former Stasi employee.
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
As a rule short term injunctions (in this case 2 days) have minimal fact checking.
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
Readit News
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...
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.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
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.
Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.
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.
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.
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).
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.
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In normal democracies searching through records require a court order.
corporations aren't people, but i could see some people applying that argument in this case.
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The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
Yes, anonymized research data is very different.
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In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
What others share just info for free?
Given it's a legal obligation? The ones whose boss isn't personally interfering with a foreign election.
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/global/collection?...
Here's the press release TFA is based on:
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutz_Heilmann
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
I don't agree, but it's a legal reality.