Don't do that, try and redirect the discussion using some dumb definition/semantics argument. This data is public data on posts that X locks behind a wall in order to force sign-ups and ad views. You and I both know the colloquial definition for "the people", it's literally the electorate of the state in question, in this case all the German citizens who are able to vote for the polticians who passed this public access law. This isn't the government trying to pry private company secrets from poor, downtrodden corporations, it's the government passing a law that public data from social media needs to be easy to access for researchers.
It's data the user has agreed to share with the company at agreement with their terms. The data is not public if it is not made public. If it was, they wouldn't need to compel them to hand it over.
Who are the researchers and what thesis are they exploring?
Moreover. Companies operate by Charter, via the will of the people (and the people is you or us). And regardless of any agreements companies have with shareholders, first and foremost, you have a responsibility to the people you live and operate with, to act for the peoples interests, otherwise you don't have a right to exist, contrary to the lack of action in law on this.
A Charter is a grant, from the people, for any for-profit organization to exist, it comes with certain restrictions and it can be revoked at any time.
Charter
a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power [The People], by which a body such as a company, college, or city is founded and its rights and privileges defined.
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
Read the last half of that. The court agrees.
> information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts
Great, so we all agree that according to the German law, researchers have access to this data, so there is no need to argue about it! I would personally go so far as to say "the people" at large should also have access to the data, so that no one can weaponize the definition of "researcher" or "the people" (which is prone to happen, as evidenced here), but luckily that's not the conversation we're having today, in this case the law is very clear and the German courts agreed so. Also, the GP post by that individual had no point, it was ostensibly a question, but in the article they covered that in this case, according to the law and German courts, "the people" means "researchers", so they either didn't read the article or were redirecting for other reasons. I just wasn't going to play around with their "definitionalism" where definitions of simple things are the most important talking point in order to off-track a discussion.
> but in the article they covered that in this case, according to the law and German courts, "the people" means "researchers",
From my review [1] [2], it appears that "researchers" is undefined.
Ultimately, can anyone apply for full access for free? I'm sure a lot of people across the political spectrum are curious about this.
If you have a clarification, great. If not, the point stands. X already has a firehose API solution [3]. While it's pay to access, it's unclear what compliance steps these researchers will have to jump through or whether anyone can just override this revenue stream for X and force it to turn over proprietary data that would otherwise be paywalled.
Researches get access, they then publish their studies. The press picks up on these studies and interprets them for "the people", unless "the people" want to read the studies by themselves.
