European researchers say major social-media platforms are obstructing access to data needed to investigate disinformation, despite the EU’s Digital Services Act giving qualified academics rights to seek it. The dispute matters because restricted access may prevent independent scrutiny of political influence campaigns, content recommendations and the monetisation of harmful material.

Maastricht University researcher Adriana Iamnitchi said TikTok rejected her team’s request to examine promotion of Romanian politician Călin Georgescu, whose content reportedly received 120 million views before the 2024 presidential vote’s first round. TikTok later identified 116,000 potentially compromised accounts and removed more than 27,000 fake accounts linked to a network promoting Georgescu and his party, while researchers also cited closed tools, costly APIs and limits on daily data collection as barriers to large-scale analysis.