A new report by Ofcom, the UK’s communication services regulator, underscores the challenges researchers face in accessing platform data and proposes a roadmap to improve researcher’s access to data to support online safety.
On July 8, Ofcom, the UK’s regulator for communication services, released its much-anticipated report taking stock of how independent researchers studying online safety can access information from online platforms and services. A requirement of the UK’s 2023 Online Safety Act, the report explores the current state of digital platform research and makes recommendations for how the UK government could advance researcher access to platform data.
The report paints a bleak picture of the current state of platform data research, detailing a wide range of challenges researchers face – including organizational, technical, and financial barriers. In response, the report offers three main policy strategies to address access challenges: clarifying existing rules, creating new platform obligations, or establishing an independent data access intermediary.
The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) welcomes the report’s focus and proposed roadmap to improve researcher access to platform data. The report incorporates many of the key priorities outlined in KGI’s submission to Ofcom’s Call for Evidence on data access.
This commentary highlights the main findings of the report, including the three key policy recommendations, and offers guidance to operationalize meaningful and effective access to platform data in the UK.
Ofcom’s report provides a picture of the range of ways that independent data access is constrained and highlights how this impacts our collective understanding of the online information environment. The report describes challenges associated with the current state of platform data research. It documents a multitude of barriers faced by researchers, including technical, institutional, and financial constraints.
KGI’s comments to Ofcom also highlighted the challenges faced by researchers, including academics, journalists, civil society organizations, and users. Researchers face significant restrictions from digital platforms who do not allow them access to crucial information.
Recommended Next Steps: Ofcom can play a key role in strengthening access to data for independent research in the UK. Ofcom’s report is expected to help inform a new Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce in the UK, which is exploring strategies to promote responsible, ethical, and secure access to data from online social platforms.
To respond to current barriers to independent research, Ofcom’s report identifies three potential policy options for the UK government to consider to improve researcher access:
Each of these policy approaches offer distinct benefits and tradeoffs – from methodological feasibility to user privacy and security. For example, clarifying existing rules could help to enable expanded access for some researchers in the nearer term, but it might not fundamentally expand access to platform data. An independent intermediary might reshape access modalities, but it could raise new data security challenges.
Recommended Next Steps: The iterative approach to facilitate greater researcher access to online safety information recommended by Ofcom is sensible. A phased approach that builds on lessons from other sectors to mature data access can help advance data access in the near term while putting in place a more robust and coherent data access regime over the longer term. KGI encourages steps to expand data access in the near term.
The report helpfully distinguishes between access to public platform data and access to privileged or internal platform data, noting that the latter will inevitably require stronger safeguards and tighter oversight of researchers..
In clarifying existing rules to data access, Ofcom cites KGI’s work to help strengthen access to publicly available platform data. KGI’s submission to Ofcom highlighted how access to publicly available platform data can be a key source of insights to understand our online information ecosystem. The report acknowledges that platforms have historically provided different forms of access to publicly available data, but that research is increasingly constrained by platforms.
Recommended Next Steps: Moving forward, we encourage Ofcom to expeditiously clarify existing rules while building longer term infrastructure for enhancing and enabling research with publicly available platform data. Access to publicly available data is not just theoretical; it is critical to understand platform dynamics and expand democratic oversight of online services and platforms.
Ofcom’s report highlights the important need to enable independent platform research, and is the latest in a string of regulatory efforts focused on how to enable public interest research of data from online platforms.
This report follows the European Commission’s July 2025 release of a delegated act on data access under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which clarifies obligations for providing groundbreaking researcher access to platforms’ internal data to understand risks in the European Union. KGI is encouraged by Ofcom’s explicit references to transatlantic collaboration and to researcher access developments happening in Europe under the DSA. Building linkages for data access efforts across jurisdictions will be vital for an effective, efficient, and secure researcher access regime.
We look forward to continued collaboration, dialogue, and learning with Ofcom, the Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce, and other stakeholders outside the UK to operationalize researcher access. Getting researcher access right is not just a technical challenge – it’s foundational for policy that advances the common good.
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