The Data Not Found Report – Social Media Data Transparency for Information Integrity

Social media platforms play a central role in contemporary public discourse, yet remain largely inaccessible to independent scrutiny. Transparency of social media data is essential for ensuring information integrity. Limited access to such data undermines evidence-based policymaking, democratic accountability, efforts to mitigate online harms, and the effective enforcement of laws across jurisdictions.

This report presents the Social Media Data Transparency Index, a systematic, first-of-its-kind assessment of data access conditions across 15 major social media platforms across the different regulatory contexts of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Developed collaboratively by NetLab UFRJ, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), the Index evaluates platform transparency in terms of the ability to access and analyse public user-generated content (UGC) and advertising data using a framework grounded in data quality principles.