In 2024, computational social scientist Philipp Lorenz-Spreen set out to study how European politicians communicate online and how much divisive language they use. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect in February 2024, gave him a legal right to ask for the data he needed from TikTok, X, Facebook, and Instagram.
What followed was a yearlong exercise in bureaucratic frustration. X repeatedly asked follow-up questions before denying his request without explanation. TikTok provided access, but other researchers had documented large gaps in the data the company shared. Meta offered an online dashboard that captured activity only from accounts with more than 25,000 followers — a threshold that excluded many European politicians.
The DSA, enacted in 2022, was designed specifically to prevent this kind of stonewalling. Article 40 of the law requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million monthly EU users — to share internal data with qualified researchers studying systemic risks such as election interference, hate speech, and public health impacts. The European Commission adopted a delegated act in July 2025 clarifying the legal and technical requirements, and established a centralized DSA data access portal for researchers to submit applications.
But enforcement has been uneven. In October 2025, the Commission announced preliminary findings that both TikTok and Meta had breached their obligations under the DSA to provide researchers adequate access to public data. The Commission accused both companies of imposing “burdensome procedures” that left researchers with partial or unreliable datasets. The same announcement also faulted Meta for failing to provide users with simple mechanisms to report illegal content.
X faced its own enforcement action earlier. In June 2025, the Commission accepted and made binding an action plan from X to comply with transparency obligations after finding that the platform restricted researcher access through tight quotas, delayed reviews, and overly narrow eligibility rules. Regulators explicitly rejected X’s argument that researchers could only study narrowly defined “systemic risks,” opening the door to broader inquiries into platform design, content moderation procedures, and algorithmic behavior.
The stakes go beyond academic curiosity. During Romania’s 2024 presidential election, accounts that had spent years posting about manicures and fashion abruptly shifted to promoting a little-known politician — a pattern that researchers could only identify with platform data the companies later restricted. Similar dynamics played out in EU parliamentary elections across multiple member states, where coordinated influence campaigns went undetected because researchers could not audit the platforms’ own internal data.
Meta has argued it is confident it has already taken the necessary steps to comply. TikTok has said the DSA’s data-sharing requirements are in tension with EU privacy regulations. But researchers and civil society groups point out that the DSA was written to resolve exactly that tension, not to create a loophole platforms can exploit.
The next test will come as more researchers submit formal data access applications through the Commission’s portal, triggering deadlines the platforms must meet or face escalating fines that could reach into the billions of euros. The law provides the framework. Whether it works in practice depends on whether the Commission is willing to follow through.
Sources: Wired (Jul 24, 2026); European Commission press release (Oct 24, 2025); Science (Oct 29, 2025); ECAT DSA researcher access FAQ (Jul 3, 2025)