Auditors != researchers.

Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers.

"Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.

Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data?

I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.

There is a big difference between auditors and "researchers". Researchers are just academics whose incentives are to publish things and makes a name for themselves - possibly the worst group to give data access to.

It's stupid to force companies to accommodate researchers. If researchers want data then they can negotiate a paid license for it.

They could implement a similar system to what Facebook currently provides when doing research with platform data. I think they only allow access to carefully controlled data through a remote sandboxed environment.

I think Twitter is already providing access to this data through paid APIs too, so this is effectively subsidizing researcher access.

But governments themselves can steer people's opinions just fine? Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?

Twitter created that definition and now the EU has the divine right to not let them change it? Verified can and does mean many things.

There's no actual need for checks.

Just take a look at their comment history, most comments are completely empty in content like this one, and I'm willing to bet that if this indeed a person, they've never lived in an European country. Nobody that actually lived in the EU says they've "left the EU", since each country is pretty different and it makes no sense to say it like that. This whole thread has bot-vibes.

And where he left to.

Taxes which are used wisely for the people’s benefit is not a wasteful thing. That was the point original commentator made.

Your reasoning is that taxation is always bad and the more you pay the worst, a very American view which I can understand given how badly US government spends money in this regard.

It's just a dog whistle. People hate tax, so calling things that are not tax "tax" triggers anger in people without deep critical thinking skills. Or people with skills but not enough energy or time to use them on this particular issue.

Actually the difference isn't that big when you consider that "taxes" (I'm using this to describe all (semi-)mandatory state money extraction from revenues, whether they're called tax, insurance, cotisation, etc) in European countries cover the majority of healthcare and retirement costs that Americans pay out of pocket. But still have to pay. So if the US had the same "tax" model as European countries do, the rate wouldn't be that off (VAT is usually higher than American sales taxes, income tax often has higher brackets, but Americans spend a lot more on healthcare and retirement).