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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

> At the heart of this case was the enforcement of a new legal provision under the DSA: the right to access research data (Article 40(12) DSA). This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks. The lawsuit has also helped clarify open legal questions regarding the judicial enforceability of this right in Germany. [0]

Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.

[0] https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...

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> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.

"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.

"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.

Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?

So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.

The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.

This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.

How convenient does the law say that it has to be?

I don't know. Perhaps you could research it to found out?

I dunno. There's an argument to be made that information which one could obtain piecemeal being made easily accessible at mass scale can create a qualitatively different situation to one in which significant labor is required to acquire it.

It's not a perfect analogy, but we can consider the case of recording in public being legal and the majority of people feeling this is reasonable, versus people's gradient of unease with uniquitous CCTV surveillance, versus how people would feel if the government made sure a law that all CCTV cameras are made remotely accessible at all times.

We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.

> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?

I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.

Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.

As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.

And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.

> a power "researchers" should have.

Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.

> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.

The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.

> are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education

I agree chucklingly that the statistical overrepresentation of lawyers in parliaments fits this assessment pretty well

Could they use this to get at X data to train LLMs?

All the words you deemed imprecise are explicitly defined at length in the relevant act.

Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.

> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.

> systemic risks

Is the key phrase here.

Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.

And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).

One possible counterargument is that bad actors could use the data to improve their spamming or astroturfing methods.

Security by obscurity?

Not exactly: in the security space, we have better tools available than obscurity. But in the spam/abuse prevention space, obscurity is the best you can do.

Counterargument it is, but its pretty weak considering benefits to free society

I agree that this seems like a net positive to me overall.

If that is the case, having researchers perform analysis makes it possible to identify that risk and that is yet another reason to make sure that public data is not obscured.

In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.

I mean ... have you been on X recently? The bad actors don't need any help.

I think Elon is still working hard to get rid of the bots, just like OJ spent years looking for the real killer.

He said he'd fix the bot problem. The bots were Elon shills and the problem was that Twitter kept removing them.

They bought the place already.

It's public data already.

But it's behind certain controls such as rate limits and other anti-abuse techniques, hence the researchers' difficulty, right?

> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.

> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

In normal democracies searching through records require a court order.

Through private/personal records. This is not the case here.

personally i think it is akin to slavery when compelling people to take certain behaviors.

corporations aren't people, but i could see some people applying that argument in this case.

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