Transparency and access to platform data are essential to knowledge production, research agenda advancement, and advocacy for the improvement of platform policies. Researchers of digital rights issues around the world demand the best practices of significant transparency of platforms, so they can develop, research and monitor the practices of content moderation, hate speech policies and recommendation algorithms. There is evidence of unequal access to this type of information and data between researchers from the United States and the European Union and researchers from the Global South. This directly affects the potential for producing high-impact research with different perspectives and epistemologies.

In this context, the project developed jointly by the areas of Culture and Knowledge and Inequalities and Identities aims to map the challenges and barriers to transparency in access to platform data in Latin America, seeking to understand how Latin American researchers perceive the transparency and data sharing efforts of platforms, how difficulties in accessing data affect their academic freedom, and how resources allocated to data transparency are regionally distributed. Based on this mapping, the project aims to develop proposals to improve the platforms’ transparency. 

Methodology 

To understand the perceptions, demands, and difficulties of data collection, the project will carry focus groups and in-depth interviews with researchers from Brazil and other Latin American countries who work with platform data. The focus groups seek to map the perceptions of researchers from different Latin American countries regarding the transparency of digital platforms and data access. From the data collected in the focus groups, individual interviews will be conducted with researchers in order to analyze in greater depth how access to data affects research activities in the region.