Report by Hugo Leal and Marie Santini: “The report is the first to apply the Social Media Data Transparency Index, a systematic, first-of-its-kind evaluation of data access conditions across 15 major social media platforms in three key regulatory environments — the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Assessments were conducted between October and December 2025 and validated in early 2026.
The findings are stark. Widely used platforms including Discord, Kwai, Pinterest, Snapchat, and WhatsApp provide no meaningful mechanisms for independent public scrutiny of either user-generated content or advertising data in any of the regions assessed. Even platforms subject to Europe’s landmark Digital Services Act — including X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat — maintain advertising transparency tools that are either non-functional or produce no results, amounting to what the researchers term ‘performative transparency’.
The report findings include:
1. Social Media Data Transparency Remains Poor: Most platforms are ranked ‘Deficient’ or worst in data access.
2. Regulation helps, but does not guarantee compliance: The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and UK regulators have improved advertising data access conditions, but many platforms including X, Snapchat, and Pinterest — all subject to DSA requirements — still fail to provide functional transparency tools.
3. Stark regional disparities reflect a compliance-driven model of selective transparency: Brazil, which lacks a dedicated platform transparency framework, consistently records the lowest levels of data access.
4. Advertising data tools are too limited for meaningful scrutiny. Many platforms require researchers to search by advertiser name rather than by topic, keyword, or targeting criteria — an architectural choice that functions as a mechanism of opacity, making it effectively impossible to identify fraudulent, misleading, or politically harmful ads without prior knowledge of the advertiser’s identity…(More)“.
