← Volume 12: Challenges and Perspectives of Hate Speech Research

 

Scraping By?

Europe’s law and policy on social media research access

Paddy Leerssen, Amélie Heldt & Matthias C. Kettemann
 

Berlin, 2023
DOI 10.48541/dcr.v12.24 (SSOAR)

Abstract: This chapter discusses the legal aspects of researchers’ access to social media data, focusing in particular on recent developments in European law. We see law as playing both an enabling and a restrictive role in facilitating platform data access. Identifying a number of shortcomings in current legislation, we argue for the creation of a sound legal framework for scholarly data research. The new Digital Services Act makes some promising first steps towards regulating programmatic data access through APIs, but many obstacles and ambiguities remain. Furthermore, a clear vision on the legal status of public interest scraping projects is still lacking. In the teeth of private ordering by global platform companies, as new gatekeepers in academic research, ensuring fair and rights-sensitive data access must be a priority for the (European) legislator.
 

 

Paddy Leerssen is a PhD candidate in Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a non-resident fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, USA.

Amélie Heldt is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow- Institut, Hamburg, and associated with the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany. ORCID logo

Matthias C. Kettemann is senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg, Germany. He is research group leader at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany, and the Sustainable Computing Lab at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria. ORCID logo

Leerssen, P., Heldt, A., & Kettemann, M. C. (2023). Scraping by? Europe’s law and policy on social media research access. In C. Strippel, S. Paasch-Colberg, M. Emmer, & J. Trebbe (Eds.), Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research (pp. 405–425). Digital Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.48541/dcr.v12.24

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