Data Access Tutorial at ICWSM 2025

ECAT will be at ICWSM'25, hosting a tutorial on researcher data access under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Find out more about the session below, and about the conference on the ICWSM website.

About the tutorial

With the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union (EU) has established a set of rules for online platforms and search engines, in particular those with more than 45 million active recipients - the designated Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Search Engines (VLOSEs). At the centre of these obligations is the need to detect, identify, and understand systemic risks in the EU, such as the dissemination of illegal content, risks to fundamental rights, negative effects in electoral processes, public health or gender-based violence, that may result from the design, functioning or usage of these platforms. However, given the complexity of such endeavour, the DSA invites researchers to contribute by investigating such risks, and to do so, enables them to access the data of VLOPs and VLOSEs. This tutorial is aimed at those researchers. The tutorial will briefly introduce the relevant definitions and provisions of the DSA and go through the most important procedural steps to obtain access, focusing particularly on the technical aspects that may be associated with data access requests.

The main audience of the tutorial are researchers interested in conducting scientific work on systemic risks in the EU with online platform data. It is expected that attendants are researchers with experience in data processing. The tutorial will provide participating researchers with the necessary knowledge to plan and execute their research projects involving access to platform data under the DSA. Participating researchers will be able to relate research questions to systemic risks, choose the correct type of data access, propose safeguards to data protection, privacy and confidentiality, and draft a data access request.

The exact timings of the tutorial will be confirmed closer to the time of the conference.