Seeing in the dark: Towards a broad construction of the access to data provisions of the DSA

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the most ambitious effort taken by liberal democratic nations to regulate social media platforms. One of the main ways it does this is by establishing various transparency obligations applicable to all platforms and search engines, as well as a specific transparency and data-sharing regime for the largest platforms and search engines, defined by the number of users. Specifically, Article 40 of the DSA grants vetted researchers access to data "for the sole purpose of conducting research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union." This article argues that Article 40's requirement for the requested data to be "necessary and proportionate" to conduct a specific type of research may hinder effective research. Indeed, researchers have been denied broad access - or any access to data - on privacy or confidentiality grounds before (Bontcheva, 2024). Consequently, researchers have limited prior knowledge of social media impacts and thus may have limited knowledge about what data, exactly, they need. Drawing on cutting-edge social media research, we explain why vetted researchers may thus need broad access to social media data to meet the objectives of the DSA. More specifically, we argue that researchers need access to system-level data, meaning data that captures how an entire digital system or platform operates, not just the activity of individual users. Consequently, we propose an interpretation of the DSA's data request requirements that would enable researchers to study the online political landscape of EU member states effectively.