Session
Organizer 1: Emma Llanso, Center for Democracy & Technology
Organizer 2: Daniel Arnaudo, National Democratic Institute
Organizer 3: Kristi Arbogast, National Democratic Institute For International Affairs
Organizer 4: Caitlin Vogus, Center for Democracy & Technology
Speaker 1: Tarunima Prabhakar, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Jhalak Mrignayani Kakkar, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: Omoruyi Austin Aigbe, Civil Society, African Group
Emma Llanso, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Caitlin Vogus, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Emma Llanso, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Break-out Group Discussions - Flexible Seating - 60 Min
1. How can mandates in one country for social media companies to provide access to data (such as Article 31 in the DSA and proposed bills in the United States) be used by researchers outside those countries? What are the risks, if any, of such use?
2. How can social media companies be encouraged or enabled to voluntarily share data with researchers outside the United States and Europe? How can the necessary trust be built between private companies controlling data and (especially Global South) civil society organizations and researchers who need access?
3. What unique issues – especially concerning user privacy or data security – need to be considered when thinking about improving access to social media data by researchers outside the United States and Europe?
Connection with previous Messages: This session picks up on ideas from the “emerging regulation” issue area as well as the “inclusive internet governance” area of focus. Worldwide, we continue to discuss and debate Internet policymaking somewhat in the dark, without the benefit of key insights about how technology affects our societies and our rights that can only be gleaned from data currently held by private companies. Independent researchers need access to data held by social media companies and other online entities in order to generate the reliable evidence base that should underpin regulation. Our session proposes to build on regulatory momentum being generated in the EU to ensure that a broader range of independent researchers worldwide can benefit from the transparency and data-access provisions of the DSA.
10.3
9.b
16.10
16.6
16.7
16.8
17.18
17.6
Targets: 9.b: This session would support research, technology development, and innovation in the Global South by providing best practices for accessing the data needed to conduct research and by identifying and amplifying the issue of inequitable access to data, pressuring the private sector in the Global North to develop relationships with Global South researchers and organizations and to consider the needs of these groups when developing data sharing policies, and pressuring governance and civil society actors to consider Global South perspectives on the issue of data transparency and privacy when developing their own recommendations and policies. Data is an invaluable resource for innovation and technology development.
10.3: Currently, discriminatory practices and policies regarding data access contribute to inequalities of outcome and a lack of opportunity for Global South researchers, civil society, and, consequently, communities. This session will work to curtail these discriminatory practices and policies by highlighting their impact, the solutions Global South practitioners have found, and the policy recommendations they would make.
16.6: This session would spotlight the effect of technology platforms’ transparency failures on Global South organizations’ ability to hold their government and private institutions accountable. Without the relevant data, researchers cannot make definitive statements about threats to the online ecosystem, preventing them from defending against disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech, which in turn affect these communities’ abilities to develop effective health policy, maintain or promote safe freedom of expression, promote diverse voices in politics, and other essential aspects of democracy. This conversation would put pressure on the private sector to provide civil society, particularly from the Global South, with the tools necessary to develop effective, accountable, and transparent institutions.
16.7: Currently, Global South organizations and researchers are not proportionately and meaningfully represented in many decision-making bodies due to an equitable lack of data access. Global South experts face additional barriers to conducting the research necessary to make fact-based decisions. They must develop and carry out complex methodologies to access the required data before they can even begin to analyze the data and develop recommendations. This session will provide best practices for Global South experts to decrease the barriers they face and for other stakeholders to develop new policies encouraging equitable data access.
Furthermore, Global South perspectives are under-represented in decision-making about data transparency and privacy, which is a space largely occupied by Global North civil society organizations, governments, and private sector tech companies. This will inevitably lead to policies with glaring gaps which leave the Global South open to exploitation, authoritarianism, and poor governance.
This conversation will increase Global South involvement in decision-making about data transparency and privacy by providing an opportunity for Global South researchers to share their perspective with a diverse and powerful group of stakeholders.
16.8: Currently inequities in data access create an additional barrier to Global South participation in institutions of global governance. Without the necessary data to study the pertinent issues these institutions were built to address, Global South representatives must work much harder to participate meaningfully in these institutions. This session will help to ease data access for relevant and democratic Global South groups and researchers, which will benefit the regions they represent. Greater access to this data will support studies focused on researchers’ local context, which will then allow representatives at global governance institutions to bring a greater understanding of the local dimensions of the issues being discussed.
16.10: Conclusions have not yet been drawn in the debate on how to increase data access without compromising the safety, security, and fundamental rights of those who generated the data. However, new national and international laws are being developed to address the need for data access without violating data privacy. While many of these laws are being developed and implemented in Global North jurisdictions, they will have consequences for the Global South, and the debate is no less pertinent in the Global South. This session will ask experts to explain what these new laws will mean for data access and protection outside of the jurisdiction they are officially implemented in and how concerns for these external regions should play into the development of new data access and privacy laws. Additionally, in part because so many of these laws are being developed in the Global North, the debate about how to balance these two needs is taking place with minimal input from Global South researchers and organizations. This leaves a gap in the issues being discussed. The perspectives of all relevant stakeholders need to be considered because local contexts provide different priorities and even different aspects to the debate. This session will spotlight the concerns and priorities of Global South experts on the issue of data access and privacy.
17.6 : The issue of data transparency is transnational. The large tech companies holding the data may be based in only a few countries, but the data they collect and the researchers who need access to that data are from around the world. Protocols the organizations develop to share data with researchers in one country are likely to be replicated in others rather than developing entirely new policies for every country. Additionally, both shared data pools and transparency demands backed by transnational groups are more effective and efficient. This collaboration requires agreement on protocols, needs, and protections and the creation of mechanisms to facilitate it. This session will help ensure that Global South countries are included in these data sharing pools and the transnational groups by creating opportunities for connections between organizations and researchers from the Global South and North. Additionally, this session will provide a forum for groups from the Global South and Global North to discuss the protocols, needs, and protections that Global South partners would require to join these transnational cooperative groups.
17.18: One of the most significant barriers to high-quality, timely, and reliable data in the Global South is their lack of data sharing agreements with Global North organizations and private companies. This is not an issue of building capacity to collect, store, or analyze data. It is an issue of building up those relationships and cultivating the meaningful participation of Global South experts in discussions about data access. This session will start to address these challenges by making the initial connections on which trust is built and encouraging those with the power to shape how data is shared to prioritize Global South inclusion.
Description:
Researchers outside the United States and Europe need access to data from social media companies to inform their work, but they are often left out of conversations in the US and Europe about access to data held by hosts of user-generated content. Participants in this workshop will build strategies for how the global community of researchers (broadly defined to include both academic and non-academic researchers and journalists) can take advantage of current data-access methods and emerging legal mandates to unearth information for research and investigations that impact their local communities.
Led by facilitators who are either researchers who work with social media data or policy advocates who advocate for researcher data access, participants will explore questions such as: What are the promises and barriers to adapting existing models of access – such as data donation, APIs, scraping, and research partnerships with social media companies – to fuel investigations of the impact of online services on people outside the United States and Europe? Will aspects of the DSA allow researchers outside of Europe to investigate the impact of online services in their home countries? What new methods of researcher access to data need to be developed to address the needs of researchers and journalists around the world?
Participants will collaborate to map the different ways of accessing data, including legal structures and self-help methods. In breakout groups, participants will discuss their experience with accessing data held by hosts of user-generated content, the data they need for their research or investigations, and what coordinated data-access efforts are available or possible.
Participants will share their experiences with accessing data held by hosts of user-generated content and explain their needs for data access. We hope to learn from participants what barriers they have faced in trying to access data; the creative solutions they have already tried and what they have learned from them; and whether and how they see collaboration with other researchers who have established methods of accessing data as a path for research conducted outside the United States and Europe.
The session will allow participants to build connections for potential collaborations that will enable greater access to data by researchers outside the US and Europe. It will inform advocacy efforts to ensure that mandates for researcher access to data in one country can benefit researchers abroad, as well. The map of different methods of accessing data can be both a resource that participants use to identify opportunities to access data for their own research and a living document that participants can continue to update after the session as they identify new methods of successfully accessing data.
Hybrid Format: We will facilitate interaction between onsite and online speakers and attendees by using the breakout group discussion format to create small groups for discussion in order to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak, whether onsite or online. We will use a live Google Doc to allow all speakers and attendees to contribute ideas and points of discussion. The Google Doc will help everyone keep track of the information being provided by speakers and attendees and give participants a place to contribute to the conversation, even as others are speaking, regardless of whether they are attending onsite or online.
We will conduct the introduction and closing of the session in a hybrid format, with online and onsite participants participating together. We’ll conduct the breakout discussions separately, so online participants will be placed in breakout discussions among themselves and onsite participants will be placed in their own breakout discussions. We believe the breakout discussions will be more useful for participants if they are not conducted in a hybrid format (i.e., combining onsite and online participants in a single breakout discussion). However, because the introduction and closing will be hybrid, online and onsite participants will still have an opportunity to hear from each other and interact.
We will design the session to maximize the amount of time devoted to discussion in small groups. Breakout discussion facilitators will have discussion prompts to guide the conversation but will encourage participants to also ask the questions and seek out information that they find most helpful and relevant to their efforts to gain access to social media data. We will emphasize that a large component of the session should be devoted to information sharing, and encourage participants to share strategies and methods for data access that they have found successful, as well as talk about the barriers to access they’ve faced and brainstorm around ways to overcome those barriers. We will also capture the information provided in written form, so it can be shared with participants after the session and used in their own work going forward.
We will use a Google doc to allow participants to give live input on the issues being discussed, particularly for those who do not feel comfortable publicly speaking during the event, and to record the information provided for dissemination to participants after the Workshop.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.