> 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.
Per @Qwertox who parented this thread with useful context, it doesn't sound like "open to all" access. That's material.
E: Here's the quote:
> This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data