Why the UK Needs Better Social Media Data Access to Research Online Harms

The author is a member of the policy research team for the Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce, established and funded by Smart Data Research UK, and is the lead author of the report discussed in this piece.

As social media platforms increasingly shape how people are informed, connected and, at times, harmed online, governments are also intervening more directly in these environments, particularly where children are concerned. Meta recently agreed, subject to court approval, to a package of new safety measures for teenagers in the United States, including default time limits and restrictions on late-night use, as part of a multi-billion-dollar settlement of litigation alleging harm to young users. The UK government has said it expects similar protections to extend to UK users.

For researchers, however, these developments raise a further question: once these interventions are in place, who will be able to independently establish whether they are working and how? Answering that question largely depends on access to social media data that has become harder to obtain. Twitter, now X, withdrew its free research API for academic researchers in 2023, while Meta closed CrowdTangle, a widely used transparency tool, the following year. This "post-API" environment has created a growing mismatch between the demand for independent evidence about platforms and the routes available to researchers to produce it.

This is the problem the Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce set out to examine: how researchers studying online harms can gain reliable access to the data they need. Established by Smart Data Research UK and co-chaired by the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, the Taskforce has spent the past year bringing researchers, regulators, funders and civil society together. Its final report, scheduled to launch on Wednesday, reaches a central conclusion: there is unlikely to be one mechanism capable of meeting the range of research needs involved. What is needed instead is a layered approach, in which different routes to data progress alongside one another and at different speeds.

A wider effort to improve access

The UK is not the only one considering these questions. In the United States, the bipartisan Platform Accountability and Transparency Act has been reintroduced in the Senate. The Knight-Georgetown Institute's recent Better Access: Data for the Common Good report similarly proposes multiple complementary mechanisms for independent access to high-influence public platform data.

The European Union has taken a different approach. Article 40 of the Digital Services Act established a statutory mechanism through which vetted researchers can request access to non-public data from very large online platforms and search engines. Its early implementation is also providing useful lessons about the practical challenge of translating a statutory entitlement into functioning access. For the UK, these developments provide experience from which to learn. They also arrive at a point when the legislative foundations for building the UK's own researcher-access environment are increasingly in place. This creates an opportunity to think about the eventual architecture of access and about what can be improved in the meantime.

Three routes, moving at different speeds

The Taskforce examined three routes in detail: public-interest web scraping, data donation and an independent statutory data intermediary. These are sometimes discussed as alternative models. Our work suggests that they are better understood as complementary parts of a wider research infrastructure.

Web scraping is already an established research method and remains one of the few ways researchers can independently collect publicly accessible platform data. Its principal challenge lies in making an existing method more predictable and sustainable, rather than in creating a new access mechanism altogether. In the near term, the report identifies clearer regulatory guidance specifically for public-interest social media research. Over the medium term, a statutory safe harbor could provide more durable legal certainty.

Data donation offers something different: a way for individuals to voluntarily contribute their own platform data to research. Its strategic potential lies in moving from a fragmented, largely retrospective process towards a more standardized form of research access. The report therefore sets out a progression from clarifying and standardizing existing processes, through better routes for delegation and redress, towards more continuous forms of donation. Over the longer term, the UK's new Smart Data framework could possibly offer a route towards more systematic, API-based portability for research.

An independent data intermediary is the most substantial piece of new infrastructure considered in the report. It could provide an independent route to data that researchers cannot obtain through scraping or donation and reduce dependence on individual arrangements between researchers and platforms. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 has already created powers to establish a researcher-access framework for research into online safety matters.

But establishing an intermediary necessarily takes time. Decisions are still required about its governance, funding, technical design and relationship with both platforms and researchers. This is why the report proposes a staged approach: establishing the legal and governance foundations first, learning from existing UK and international data infrastructures, involving researchers in its design and ultimately creating a statutory intermediary.

The strategic point is that all three mechanisms solve different problems. Scraping enables independent research using public data, while data donation allows people to contribute their own. An intermediary, in turn, could enable access to platform-held data that is not publicly available or obtainable through individual data donation. Some improvements can also be made now using existing institutions and powers, while more ambitious infrastructure will take longer to build. But developing and combining these three models matters more than choosing among them.

The research community is part of the infrastructure

But data-access infrastructure is only useful if researchers are equipped to use it. Creating better routes for accessing platform data will not ensure by itself that all researchers are able to use them. The Taskforce's work over the last year concluded that the UK research community shares many of the same challenges but does not always address them collectively. Approaches to legal uncertainty, institutional risk and emerging research methods can differ considerably between organizations. Larger universities may also have access to specialist legal and technical resources that smaller institutions, charities and independent researchers do not.

The report therefore makes recommendations to the research community and its funders alongside those directed at government and regulators. The strategy has three parts: the adoption of more consistent approaches to recurring access problems, the strengthening of legal, ethical and technical skills, as well as the building of longer-term forms of collective support.

This includes practical training and resources, clearer institutional positions on research methods such as public-interest scraping, greater collaboration with international research infrastructures and, ultimately, a legal defense fund and coordination mechanism for researchers facing platform action. The broader point is that access infrastructure is not only technical or legislative. It is also institutional. A formal right or mechanism for accessing data has limited value if only a small number of well-resourced researchers have the confidence, expertise or institutional support required to use it.

Building the pieces together

Ofcom's statutory work on researcher access has already concluded that no single model is likely to meet the full range of researcher needs, pointing instead towards a layered and flexible approach. The Taskforce's work builds on that conclusion by considering what the different layers might require and how they could evolve over time. The government's forthcoming consultation on researcher access therefore comes at an important point. The UK now has the opportunity to consider longer-term infrastructure alongside measures that could strengthen existing research methods, while also learning from approaches under way in the United States and European Union.

The report's recommendations distinguish between what can be clarified using existing powers, what requires further regulatory or legislative development and what requires new infrastructure, reflecting that different parts of this system are ready to advance on different timelines. As the UK's online safety framework matures, the need for independent evidence about online harms will grow alongside it. The challenge is now to build an environment where different forms of responsible access to that evidence can develop together, matched by a research community with the capacity to use them.