An update across the transparency world
I want to send a quick update on the world of data access and transparency. A lot has happened over the last few months:
The Good: The European Commission launched a formal investigation into Twitter’s compliance with Article 40.12
I’ll be writing more on this topic soon but what’s important right now is that Twitter is officially under investigation by the European Commission for failing to comply with a number of different mandates in the DSA, including the data access provisions in Article 40.12.
I don’t know for sure whether Twitter is violating Article 40.12 but it doesn’t look good.
After spending most of 2023 aggressively curtailing researcher access to data, in mid-November, they very quietly launched a public form where researchers can apply for access. The application itself is a bit unusual, including questions that ask for things like a list of all “indirect” funding and also detailed information about an organization’s board members and directors. There’s also very little detail on the program itself, including what data is available, technical specs of the APIs, what kind of support is available, any data protection requirements, etc.
Most importantly, though, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who has actually gotten access (despite talking to a number of high-profile and very reputable researchers who have applied). Needless to say, simply launching a form isn’t compliance.
And perhaps because of what they’ve already learned from Twitter, the Commission seems to be moving on to evaluating even broader compliance with the provision. Just last week, they announced they were requesting information about 40.12 compliance from *all* the qualifying platforms.
Both these efforts are sending a strong signal that the Commission is taking compliance with 40.12 seriously and that’s a really promising sign. I hope they take a strong stance that compliance has to result in meaningful data access (simply launching forms online doesn’t count) and for any platforms that they find are out of compliance, I hope that they come out with aggressive enforcement that sends a clear signal to the market.
Their decisions on 40.12 compliance could end up being the single most important thing to happen in data access & transparency this year.
The Good: Netflix released an impressively comprehensive transparency report
In December, Netflix released an incredibly thorough report on the overall viewership of its entire catalog. For the first time, the public can now see all the most popular (and not popular) shows across all of Netflix.
I think the report is fascinating for a bunch of reasons, including what it tells us about the labor and market dynamics of Netflix’s business at the moment. But I thought it was interesting that it was also basically the complete opposite of Meta’s Widely-Viewed Content Report (ostensibly a similar genre of transparency report). Instead of selectively choosing a tiny subset of popular content only in the U.S., Netflix’s report has every single show globally.
The Good: LinkedIn’s attempts to comply with 40.12
Speaking of which, one platform that I didn’t realize had launched a 40.12 effort was LinkedIn. But in August, it appears they did and you can see the details here. More on this coming soon as well.
The Good: Casey Newton and Substack
One theme that you hear from me a lot is that any meaningful transparency programs should have a way for journalists to better monitor what’s happening on some of our largest platforms. What happened over the last month with the Atlantic, Casey Newton, and Substack is a perfect example for me.
The entire story, including how thoughtfully and fairly Casey went about it, represents exactly why journalists play such a critical role in holding platforms accountable, as well as simply creating space to have conversations about their policies, their enforcement, and the role they play in our lives.
Kudos to Casey and because of Substack’s disappointing response to the issues he and others raised (not to mention the ways they went about it), I’ll be following in his footsteps and moving this newsletter off of Substack in the next few months as well.
The Bad: TikTok conveniently decided to get rid of their search function they offer creators
Related to that point, in what reads like a very familiar story at this point, TikTok found that a search tool it made available to creators and marketers was being used by journalists and researchers to try and understand broader trends on its platform, especially around the Israel/Hamas conflict. TikTok felt that some of those narratives were inaccurate (and TikTok seemed to have a point) and so they shut the search function down.
It’s a microstory that beautifully captures most of the core dynamics around this entire topic that we’ve seen over and over for years, including:
Journalists need this data to be able to cover the role of platforms and more broadly, to understand what’s happening in the world
If a platform doesn’t make the data available, journalists will make do with whatever they can (even if they end up perpetrating false or misleading narratives without realizing it)
The misleading narratives frustrate platform executives (rightly so) and some of them respond by shutting down whatever mechanism the journalists were using and burn down lots of other actual use cases in the process
Start back over at step one and rinse & repeat
The real answer is to make it legally required for platforms to provide good data in ethical & responsible ways and make it as broadly available as they can, including to journalists.
Some other articles:
I talked to Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic about why it’s hard to study the internet these days
A new paper by Martin Husovec, “The Digital Service Act’s Red Line: What the Commission Can and Cannot Do About Disinformation”
I’m a huge fan of this project to evaluate how transparent AI foundation models are and even more so now that they’ve brought this group together to help advise where it goes next
I’ll be at the Knight Informed Conference this week…it’s become one of my favorite gatherings each year
It’s tough to read as much as I’d like with so many young kids running around the house these days but here’s my book list from 2023…my favorites were All The Light We Cannot See, Exhalation and Master Switch
The cover art is a piece by Takashi Murakami who is having a great exhibit at the Asian American Art Museum in San Francisco and I highly recommend!