Research on digital platforms is essential for understanding contemporary transformations in forms of participation, interaction, and public expression. Platforms such as social media, messaging services, and spaces for content creation and circulation have reshaped the dynamics through which people stay informed, build connections, participate in public debates, advocate for causes, and organize collective ad action. Analyzing these environments allows us to study not only user behavior but also the role that algorithms, technical architectures, and moderation and governance policies play in shaping social and political life.
The importance of this type of research lies in the fact that digital platforms have become central infrastructures of social, cultural, economic, and political life, yet universities and researchers have increasingly limited access to the data needed to study them. This creates a paradox: platforms have a growing capacity to observe and analyze societies, while societies have a diminishing capacity to observe and analyze platforms.
This asymmetry is particularly problematic in Latin America. Without access to data, it is more difficult to empirically study how recommendation algorithms work, how disinformation circulates, how processes of polarization and radicalization occur, how social mobilizations are organized, how political advertising is distributed, how platforms affect vulnerable groups, or how linguistic, economic, and cultural inequalities are reproduced. It also makes it difficult to assess whether the moderation policies and algorithmic decisions of global companies have differentiated effects on Latin American societies.
In research, the public interest refers to scholarly inquiry and practices aimed at understanding and solving society’s greatest challenges, alleviating the harms of digital technologies, and ultimately benefiting the public good. Conducting research in the public interest is critical for providing empirical evidence to guide governance and protect human rights, ensuring that policymakers are not left legislating in the dark without a clear understanding of systemic issues.
Social media data is necessary for this research because online platforms have become the primary digital public sphere where contemporary social and political dynamics unfold.
Accessing social media data for public interest research in Latin America is an increasingly difficult challenge characterized by severe economic, structural, and political barriers. Local researchers and educators must constantly grapple with incremental data access costs, a lack of technical infrastructure, and hurdles in retaining qualified human talent.
Unlike researchers in the European Union who can leverage structured platform data access under provisions like the Digital Services Act (DSA), Latin American scholars are locked out of critical data streams—such as TikTok’s API—despite corporate promises. Replicating European regulatory frameworks in the region remains highly impractical due to disparate national data protection laws and overstretched institutional capacities, forcing researchers to depend on the changing whims and unstable API policies of Silicon Valley platforms.
Having a regulatory framework that guarantees access to data from digital platforms is essential for strengthening independent scientific research and promoting transparency and accountability among technology companies. Such a framework would allow for the establishment of clear and balanced rules that reconcile the protection of privacy and personal data with the right of qualified researchers to access information relevant to the study of phenomena of public interest. In addition to reducing reliance on voluntary agreements and the platforms’ unilateral decisions regarding which data to share, appropriate regulation could establish secure access mechanisms, accreditation criteria, protection standards, and institutional oversight.
In Latin America, this framework is particularly necessary to strengthen the capacities of universities and research centers, reduce knowledge asymmetries vis-à-vis large tech companies, and ensure that phenomena such as disinformation, polarization, digital violence, political mobilization, and algorithmic effects can be studied from perspectives rooted in the region.
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