The most inﬂuential law governing researchers’ (and any outsiders’) access to
social media data, however, is the European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR). That law has presented new and somewhat indiscernible
constraints on the use and release of social media data for research. GDPR
contains exceptions for certain types of research (Article 89), but both the rule
itself and, in particular, the member states’ divergent implementation of it have
been less than clear as to the boundaries of this exception. Confusion revolves
around the required procedures to minimize risks to privacy, as well as the
degree of anonymization (or pseudonymization) required for social media data.
Although individual names and identifying information can be removed from
social media datasets, doing so might not be sufﬁcient to pass the legal bar of
anonymization given the richness of those datasets and the outside chance that
Social_Media_and_Democracy