Big Tech accused of stonewalling European social media researchers

大型科技公司被指阻挠欧洲社交媒体研究人员

In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu. His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote.

在2024年11月罗马尼亚总统大选前的最后几周，一些此前多年只发布美甲或时尚内容的TikTok账号，突然开始推广一位鲜为人知的政治人物卡林·乔治斯库（Calin Georgescu）。他发布的帖子宣扬强硬的移民立场和反犹太主义言论，在投票前获得了1.2亿次观看。此前民调支持率仅为个位数的乔治斯库，以23%的得票率赢得了首轮选举，令观察人士大为震惊。

In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content. On October 28, 2025, a month before Georgescu won the first round, she and her team applied for access to TikTok’s Application Programming Interface (API) under the EU’s recent Digital Services Act (DSA). Their request was denied.

在荷兰，阿德里安娜·伊姆尼奇（Adriana Iamnitchi）一直在密切关注。作为马斯特里赫特大学计算社会科学系主任，她负责领导关于虚假信息运动的研究。她想了解支持乔治斯库的内容是如何通过隐蔽的网红营销和直播政治内容在TikTok上实现变现的。2025年10月28日，即乔治斯库赢得首轮选举前一个月，她和她的团队根据欧盟近期出台的《数字服务法》（DSA）申请访问TikTok的应用程序接口（API）。但他们的请求被拒绝了。

TikTok said they had failed to prove they were established researchers or to explain their commercial interests or to meet security requirements, Iamnitchi wrote in a blog post. But two months later, TikTok flagged 116k accounts as potentially compromised before taking action against more than 27,000 fake accounts in a coordinated network run by a third-party “fake engagement vendor” that was promoting Georgescu and his party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). TikTok said it did not know who operated the network or where it originated.

伊姆尼奇在博客中写道，TikTok称他们未能证明自己是资深研究人员，也未能解释其商业利益或满足安全要求。然而两个月后，TikTok标记了11.6万个可能被入侵的账号，并对一个由第三方“虚假互动供应商”运营的协调网络采取了行动，封禁了超过2.7万个虚假账号，该网络一直在推广乔治斯库及其政党——罗马尼亚人团结联盟（AUR）。TikTok表示，他们不知道是谁运营了该网络，也不知道其来源。

The first round of voting was annulled and in the runoff in May 2025, independent candidate and former Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan beat AUR’s George Simion, who took over the party after Georgescu was barred from running again. Georgescu said on his YouTube channel that annulling the 2024 results was “practically a formalized coup d’état” by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Declassified Romanian intelligence showed he “benefited” from massive exposure and preferential treatment by TikTok and that Russia had allegedly coordinated the online campaign to elect Georgescu.

首轮投票被宣布无效，在2025年5月的决选中，独立候选人、前布加勒斯特市长尼库什·丹（Nicușor Dan）击败了AUR的乔治·西米恩（George Simion），后者在乔治斯库被禁止再次参选后接管了该党。乔治斯库在他的YouTube频道上称，废除2024年的选举结果是罗马尼亚宪法法院“实际上是一场形式化的政变”。解密的罗马尼亚情报显示，他“受益于”TikTok的大规模曝光和优待，且俄罗斯涉嫌协调了这场旨在选举乔治斯库的在线运动。

Iamnitchi believes her team might have been able to identify who created and profited from the pro-Georgescu content had they gained access to the data. “If you are a scholar interested in how social media shapes society, the past years have been tough,” she wrote. “When you need data to investigate that impact, and that data is privately held, it can become practically impossible to research this space.”

伊姆尼奇认为，如果她的团队能够获得数据，或许就能查明是谁制作了支持乔治斯库的内容并从中获利。“如果你是一位关注社交媒体如何塑造社会的学者，过去几年会过得很艰难，”她写道，“当你需要数据来调查这种影响，而这些数据又被私人公司掌握时，在这个领域进行研究几乎是不可能的。”

Iamnitchi is one of several misinformation researchers who told WIRED that, despite being legally entitled to obtain platform data under EU law, they face obstacles, obfuscation, and, in some cases, court battles to obtain it. Last year the law was broadened to increase researcher access, but it’s the implementation, not the scope of the law itself, that researchers say is the issue.

伊姆尼奇是多位向《连线》（WIRED）杂志反映情况的虚假信息研究人员之一。他们表示，尽管根据欧盟法律，他们有权获取平台数据，但在实际操作中却面临障碍、推诿，有时甚至需要通过法律诉讼才能获得数据。去年，该法律的适用范围有所扩大，旨在增加研究人员的访问权限，但研究人员认为，问题不在于法律本身的范围，而在于执行层面。

In recent years, social media companies shut down public access tools like Meta’s CrowdTangle and replaced them with content libraries, or, like X, paywalled their API data, forcing academics to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany. Researchers say that without API access, what Iamnitchi describes as the “black holes” in what society knows about how these platforms recommend content or handle reports regarding sensitive content will only grow.

德国民主报告国际组织（DRI）的研究官员邓肯·艾伦（Duncan Allen）表示，近年来，社交媒体公司关闭了Meta的CrowdTangle等公共访问工具，取而代之的是内容库；或者像X平台那样，对API数据设置付费墙，迫使学术界每月支付“数百美元”。研究人员表示，如果没有API访问权限，社会对于这些平台如何推荐内容或处理敏感内容举报的了解将出现更多伊姆尼奇所说的“黑洞”。

Others, like TikTok, cap how many posts any researcher account can pull each day, which Allen said can make it “impossible to study anything at scale.” The DSA was meant to solve this by allowing vetted researchers at credible institutions to have access to API data if they could show it would help in studying systemic risks, from illegal content to threats to fundamental rights.

其他平台（如TikTok）则限制了每个研究人员账号每天可以抓取的帖子数量，艾伦称这使得“进行大规模研究变得不可能”。《数字服务法》（DSA）旨在通过允许受信任机构的审核研究人员访问API数据来解决这一问题，前提是他们能证明这些数据有助于研究从非法内容到基本权利威胁等系统性风险。

But two years after the law took effect, researchers say they struggle to meet its security requirements and face narrow interpretations from platforms of what qualifies as a systemic risk. Application forms differ by platform, but most require data to be stored on infrastructure that cannot be compromised—such as a machine physically disconnected from the Internet—a resource most universities lack, Iamnitchi said.

但该法律生效两年后，研究人员表示，他们难以满足其安全要求，且平台对“何为系统性风险”的定义过于狭隘。伊姆尼奇指出，各平台的申请表格各不相同，但大多数要求数据存储在无法被入侵的基础设施上——例如物理上与互联网断开的机器——这是大多数大学所缺乏的资源。

Even for researchers who secure approval, “there’s no guarantee that the data is good,” said L. K. Seiling, coordinator of the DSA40 Collaboratory, a German initiative that tracks 46 DSA applications. API data is often difficult for a colleague to reproduce, so a researcher’s work cannot be checked for errors, which Iamnitchi said is a “basic requirement of science.”

即使是获得批准的研究人员，“也无法保证数据质量，”DSA40协作组织（一个追踪46项DSA申请的德国倡议）的协调员L. K. Seiling表示。API数据往往难以被同事复现，因此研究人员的工作无法进行错误核查，而伊姆尼奇认为这是“科学的基本要求”。

DSA40 data shows that of 46 tracked applications, 20 were approved and 14 rejected. But approval rates vary widely: TikTok approved 11 of 13 applications, while X rejected 11 of 23. The true rejection rate is likely higher because the tracker relies on voluntary reporting, Seiling said. “There’s no structured advantage for researchers to use this pathway,” Seiling said. “Data access as it’s set up right now tries to disincentivize researchers.”

DSA40的数据显示，在追踪的46项申请中，20项获得批准，14项被拒绝。但批准率差异巨大：TikTok批准了13项申请中的11项，而X拒绝了23项申请中的11项。Seiling表示，真实的拒绝率可能更高，因为该追踪器依赖于自愿报告。“研究人员使用这种途径并没有结构性优势，”Seiling说，“目前的设置实际上是在阻碍研究人员。”

A TikTok spokesperson told WIRED the company has given more than 1,500 research teams access to its tools, approved 130 applications in the EU in the second half of last year, and that its daily quota of 1,000 API requests lets researchers pull up to 100,000 video and comment records a day, or up to 2 million follower records. TikTok said it considers its research tools compliant with the DSA but “would welcome further public guidance.” A Meta spokesperson said CrowdTangle covered only a fraction of the company’s public data, while the Meta Content Library and API that replaced it are “the most comprehensive research tools to date.”

TikTok发言人告诉《连线》杂志，该公司已向超过1500个研究团队提供了工具访问权限，去年下半年在欧盟批准了130项申请。其每天1000次API请求的配额允许研究人员每天抓取多达10万条视频和评论记录，或多达200万条关注者记录。TikTok表示，其研究工具符合DSA的要求，但“欢迎进一步的公共指导”。Meta发言人则表示，CrowdTangle仅涵盖了该公司公共数据的一小部分，而取代它的Meta内容库和API是“迄今为止最全面的研究工具”。