A group of 75+ scholars and non-profits urges social media companies to preserve data on content removal during the pandemic and make it available for research
Adi Robertson / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The letter arrives two months after Facebook and Social Science One finally delivered their ~38M-URL research dataset — proof that platform data can reach academics, but only through slow, negotiated pipelines. What these 75+ scholars and non-profits are asking for is harder: preservation of content *removals*, which are destroyed by design the moment moderation happens.
The timing matters because pandemic-era moderation is happening at unusual scale and speed, and deleted takedowns leave no record for anyone to study later. The same destruction-vs-preservation tension resurfaced after the [[a:962391|Capitol riots, when platforms purging harmful content collided with police gathering evidence]] — making this letter an early entry in what became a recurring fight over who gets to keep platform history.
First-order effects
- Social media companies face an immediate operational choice during the pandemic moderation surge: log removals as they happen or lose that record permanently, since deleted content cannot be reconstructed retroactively.
- Researchers studying COVID-19 misinformation enforcement gain a concrete ask to organize around, rather than waiting years for negotiated datasets like the Social Science One release.
Second-order effects
- Voluntary researcher-access programs come under pressure to cover enforcement actions, not just URLs and engagement data — platforms that already built dataset pipelines are the natural first movers, while rivals without one look less transparent by comparison.
- Government actors see a template: once scholars frame platform data as a public-interest record, formal state requests like the surgeon general's later demand for COVID-19 misinformation data become easier to justify.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform content decisions shift from ephemeral private actions toward a de facto public archive with mandated retention — the Capitol-riots episode already showed the gap that international data-preservation laws would need to fill.
- Research access becomes structural rather than charitable: internal research groups like the one Meta later consolidated under Pratiti Raychoudhury coexist with an external ecosystem whose access terms are increasingly set by regulators and coalitions, not platform goodwill.
The trend: Platform data is moving from ad-hoc, voluntarily shared datasets toward preserved, externally accessible records whose retention and access rules are set by coalitions of researchers and, increasingly, governments.