And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.
In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube there has been a growth in more minor and niche platforms. Similarly, the range of actors has diversified too, with new far-right movements and individuals emerging and gaining prominence, and people and information moving across those platforms. This significantly complicates the research process.
In this context, the ethics review process also becomes more challenging: not all these platforms are covered by the DSA and/or provide API access, so content scraping is necessarily a part of the research process, but this might violate the Terms of Service, and ethics boards may be reluctant to approve such approaches. The growing move towards audiovisual content also requires more content storage, and this also generates challenges in relation to copyright.
Further, ethics boards are sometimes also concerned about gathering basic personal details (such as the number of followers they have on a given platform), even for known far-right actors. And finally, with far-right activists, some of the content being gathered may also be illegal, and researchers may put themselves in jeopardy if they hold such content even for legitimate research purposes.
Some solutions to this include the use of third-party tools like Open Measures, which holds some such content on behalf of researchers; to work with public authorities that have a direct interest in holding platforms as well as far-right activists to account (e.g. to ensure that problematic content is removed from platforms); and perhaps also to work with data donations from ordinary users, to capture the far-right content they encountered even if it was subsequently deleted from a platform.
