The cause of combating data blackout

By: Carlos Cortés

This text originally appeared in the Network of Experts on Democracy and Technology in alliance with La Silla Vacía.

To take the pulse of the online public conversation is to assemble a puzzle of indefinite size and without a reference image. We do not know what we are going to see, nor do we have all the tools to see it. We put together figures of dissimilar sizes and shapes, discovering answers as we move forward blindly. As time goes by, the challenge becomes monumental: the entropy of the discussion increases, but we have fewer pieces to understand it. It is no longer a puzzle but a closed labyrinth.

In May of this year, several civil society organizations sent a letter of protest to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. The umbrella company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, had decided to shut down Crowdtangle, the analytics tool for exploring public content on its social networks. "This obstacle poses a serious risk to the efforts of civil rights groups, activists, journalists and election officials to identify and mitigate political misinformation, incitements to violence and online harassment of vulnerable communities," they wrote.

Meta replaced Crowdtangle with the Content Library, a tool with much more limited capabilities, greater restrictions on data usage, and little search functionality. Still, all organizations - including Green Lantern - requested access. In our case, we spent six months unsuccessfully navigating the bureaucracy of requirements. Only until Meta's 'Supreme Court' - the Oversight Board - scolded the company did the process speed up and the approvals came through.

"We are facing an inequality that is not new, a data colonialism that is rewritten in history," commented Fernanda Martins, research director of the Brazilian organization InternetLab, in a conversation we had on the subject (see CHCH for 'The cause of data: platforms and public interest').

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Access to user activity and content on social networks is increasingly limited, moving steadily towards what experts call the "data blackout".data blackout". While Meta offers the restricted API (as these interfaces for connecting applications are known), X has a basic free version and paid packages; TikTok* launched an API for public interest research, but it is not available in Latin America, and Linkedin provides access through direct requests. The exception is Youtube, which with a robust API has become an oasis in the middle of the data desert.

Beyond that, the APIs offered by the platforms are primarily intended for marketing and sales purposes. A civil society organization can opt for these commercial solutions, a subscription to proprietary applications from which data can be extracted from social networks. However, the cost may be prohibitive to the budget of an NGO or media outlet: a digital social listening tool - such as Talkwalker or Meltwater -costs between eleven thousand and fourteen thousand dollars per year. And, in any case, acquiring this service does not guarantee full access to data on publications, users and interactions. We face a structural asymmetry in access to this knowledge.

In an effort to level the playing field, the European Union's Digital Services Act (known as the DSA), provides for, among others, access to platform data for public interest research purposes. The scope is limited to contributing to "the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the European Union." It is necessary to be an approved research center within the European jurisdiction and follow a process to obtain the data.

Latin America is not in that picture. Media, NGOs and research centers look at the "Brussels effect" from a distance.Brussels effect"We combine commercial alternatives and proprietary solutions, and try to keep afloat a critical sector to understand the dilemmas of democratic integrity and civic space in the region. How to advance this agenda?

Addressing this question was the purpose of a meeting convened by Green Lantern - with the support of Luminate and the Canadian Embassy - last week in Bogota with a group of journalists, researchers and activists from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. With the idea of structuring a roadmap, we focused on three fronts of this challenge: collaboration and alliances, innovation and technology, and regulation and ethics.

The cause of data implies articulating a common space between organizations, connecting with the global demand for transparency and promoting the development of tools designed for social research (as in the case of Junkipedia). To begin with, we must better understand what our demand for data is, what we need it for and what effect we are looking for. Monitoring the digital debate involves the constant temptation to fetishize metrics, which, stripped of context and analysis, are of little use. In the words of Victor Hugo Abrego of Signa Lab Mexico, with whom I also spoke, "the bigger the number, the bigger what the number does not tell us".

This effort should also be a place to insist on the aspiration to have public digital spaces, however idealistic it may seem. As American scholar Julie Cohen explains, "platform-based communication infrastructures are tilting human societies away from admittedly imperfect democratic balances" toward forms of social interaction that encourage tribal enmity, distrust and conspiracy-mongering.

The cause of data also requires that democratic debate ceases to depend on the will of private platforms. Without alternatives of a public nature and vocation, we will remain in the hands of the housekeepers of shopping malls.

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