That is not enough. To truly hold the platforms accountable, we must support the journalists who are on the front lines of chronicling how despots, trolls, spies, marketers and hate mobs are weaponizing tech platforms or being enabled by them.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa runs Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines that has been at the forefront of analyzing how Filipino leaders have used social media to spread disinformation, hijack social media hashtags, manipulate public opinion and attack independent journalism.
Last year, for instance, Rappler revealed that the majority of Twitter accounts using certain hashtags in support of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, had been created in a one-month period, making it likely that many of them were fake accounts. With the Twitter research feed that Rappler used now shuttered, and the platforms cracking down on data access, it’s not clear how Ms. Ressa and her colleagues can keep doing this type of important accountability journalism.
Ms. Ressa asked the European Commission, in public comments filed in May, to provide journalists with “access to real-time data” so they can provide “a macro view of patterns and trends that these technology companies create and the real-world harms they enable.” (I also filed comments to the European Commission, along with more than a dozen journalists, asking the commission to support access to platform data for journalists.)
As Daphne Keller, the director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, argues in her comments to the European Union, allowing journalists and researchers to use automated tools to collect publicly available data from platforms is one of the best ways to ensure transparency because it “is a rare form of transparency that does not depend on the very platforms who are being studied to generate information or act as gatekeepers.”
Of course, the tech platforms often push back against transparency requests by claiming that they must protect the privacy of their users. Which is hilarious, given that their business models are based on mining and monetizing their users’ personal data. But putting that aside, the privacy interests of users are not being implicated here: The data that journalists need is already public for anyone who has an account on these services.
What journalists lack is access to large quantities of public data from tech platforms in order to understand whether an event is an anomaly or representative of a larger trend. Without that access, we will continue to have what we have now: a lot of anecdotes about this piece of content or that user being banned, but no real sense of whether these stories are statistically significant.