Paper by the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI): “Online platforms and services shape what we know, how we connect, and who gets heard. From elections and public health to commerce and conflict, platforms are now indispensable infrastructure for civic life. Their influence is vast, and so is the need to understand them.
As critical conversations publicly unfold on digital platforms, the ability to study these posts and content at scale has steadily diminished. Tools like Facebook’s CrowdTangle – which once offered researchers, journalists, and civil society a window into public online discourse – have disappeared. Meta, Reddit, and X have restricted data access tools that were once widely available, and researchers have faced threats of litigation for accessing public platform data.
Platforms restrict researcher access while public data is increasingly monetized for advertisers, data brokers, and training artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This imbalance – where companies profit while independent researchers are left in the dark – undermines transparency, limits free expression, and weakens oversight.
That is the reason for developing Better Access, a baseline framework for independent access to public platform data: the content, data, and information posted to platforms that anyone can access. …(More)”.
