Price, proficiency, or permission: assessing platform data access for election research

In order for researchers and citizens to understand the significance of social media platforms to political campaigns and elections, it is necessary to maintain a transparent and responsible framework for researcher data access. However, inconsistent data access approaches have hindered global research on social media and elections. To explore this challenge and propose a set of policy recommendations, we compile a list of data access approaches and analyze them along two dimensions: (1) independent-versus-collaborative approaches; (2) consumption-versus-content data. We highlight the ephemeral nature of permission-based data access, the lack of support for consumption-based data access programs, and the need to support a plurality of data access approaches when studying elections. Finally, we argue that election researchers are uniquely situated to advocate for more researcher data access, build multi-institutional data archives, and leverage relatively new data access policies.