Over the past decade, social media platforms have moved from offering researchers and other public-interest users large volumes of public data via official voluntary transparency programs to making this data increasingly inaccessible. This tightening increases risks for society and platforms alike. Platform transparency has had significant positive impact for public awareness and civic engagement, academic understanding of the impacts of social media platforms, government and regulatory action to ensure platforms are acting for the benefit of society, and for the platforms themselves, who adjust their policies and enforcement as informed by external researchers and journalists flagging harms.
There is a robust body of computational social science and decades of internet research that have impacted a wide array of industries. In the interest of making the case for transparency, this paper highlights a small number of prominent cases demonstrating the positive impacts of transparency across platform decision-making, regulation, public awareness, and academic understanding, especially connected to voluntary transparency programs that have been shut down.
The full report can be accessed below.