In December, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on X, the first non-compliance decision issued under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The penalty rested on three findings, including that X had made access to its public data unduly difficult for the very researchers the DSA was meant to empower. On July 15, after a first set of inadequate remedies, the Commission accepted X’s revised remedies.

A regulator told the largest self-styled free speech platform that excluding researchers is unlawful, and X committed, at least on paper, to changing its ways. This is a victory for researchers; yet the Commission’s acceptance of corrective measures alone does not ensure researcher data access in public interest research requires tested, researcher-supported data access rules for all online platforms.

Data access remedies

On data access, X made three commitments that together the Commission accepted as remedies. The first concerns X’s terms of service, which must now state explicitly that eligible researchers are not contractually prohibited from scraping public data. The second concerns the vetting process, to be rebuilt so that “eligible researchers are not excluded in error”, with processing times cut and the endless back and forth with applicants brought to a halt. The third, and the most consequential, concerns the API itself, access to which must henceforth be free of charge and provided in generous volumes.

Celebrating a partial victory for and by researchers

These remedies are no small feat; they mark a real milestone on the long road to researcher data access. They come after years of advocacy, research, and information exchange by independent researchers.

And yet, two concerns persist: the approved remedies are opaque, forcing researchers to wait and see how X implements them, and there is a possibility that the remedies are a cynical hedge by X, put forward only to avoid daily penalties rather than to commit to permanent data access for researchers.

Take the opacity first. What the Commission disclosed of the remedies raises more questions than it answers. We do not know what the “reformed” vetting process will look like. Will X stop demanding more of applicants than the law entitles it to? Will it commit to a transparent, reasonable timeline for processing applications? What do we make of “excluded in error?” - a commitment in the remedies that seems to imply past rejections of eligible researchers were honest mistakes rather than deliberate exclusions.

LK Seiling at the DSA40 Data Access Collaboratory maintains a tracker which lets researchers share their email correspondence with platforms to better understand platform responses. For X, across the applications tracked, not a single researcher was granted direct access. Applicants were either rejected outright or met with a set of seemingly pre-written follow-up questions, each demanding yet more information. In several cases, this produced question-and-answer loops that dragged on interminably.

X’s remedies are intended to dismantle this structurally biased screening, with X undertaking to “reduce significantly the processing time for researcher applications, including by avoiding unnecessary exchanges with applicants.” Whether that screening has in fact been dismantled, or merely relabelled, remains to be seen.

Ultimately, the only way to know whether applications are processed faster, access arrives free and in the promised “appropriate volumes,” or vetting quietly goes on excluding those it ought to admit, is to submit applications and see what becomes of them. The record researchers build collectively is, in the end, the only yardstick against which X’s compliance can honestly be measured.

Making data access durable

This brings us to the second, and graver, consideration: given X’s adversarial history on data access, an action plan drawn up under the threat of the daily penalties X would have incurred had it missed its ninety-day deadline to implement remedies may prove an exercise in risk mitigation rather than a genuine change of behavior. Independent researchers must now verify that the negotiated remedies deliver the access the DSA intended.

Even if X implements these commitments, the underlying legal questions remain before the Court. A successful appeal could reshape the obligations on which researchers now depend.

For this reason, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research filed a request for leave to intervene in the case. The outcome will shape the terms of data access on which every independent researcher depends, across platforms. Researchers ought to be represented when data access terms are decided.

While X’s remedies are a partial victory, researchers need to be able to depend on clear and resilient data access rules to provide public interest research about platforms. As researchers, we know from experience that platforms have not opened their data out of any newfound appreciation for independent scrutiny; they have done so partially and grudgingly, because they were made to do so. For researchers, a strategy dependent on platform goodwill is no strategy at all.

Ensuring lasting, durable data access will require a researcher-underwritten, shared set of expectations around data access and a common set of remedies. The Data Access Task Force, convened by the Coalition, is exploring a set of demands to be put, not just to X, but to every large platform still wagering that access will not be obligated.

No platform has ever volunteered this access. Every inch of it has been fought for and this latest inch will need to be defended.

Editors’s note: Tech Policy Press is a member of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR).