CoCoDa project receives funding from Swiss National Science Foundation
Konrad Kollnig and Gijs van Dijck, together with partners at the University of St. Gallen, the University of Lausanne, and the Open Data Institute, were awarded a €1.2M project by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The CoCoDa project is a 4-year research project that brings together technical and legal research to address the high concentration of control and data held by vast online platforms.
The CoCoDa project responds to growing concerns around the societal harms created by large online platforms. These harms include the spread of hateful or misleading content, the emergence of filter bubbles that reinforce polarisation, and serious threats to user privacy. Despite considerable academic and regulatory attention, progress has been limited by two major obstacles: technical methods to access platform data often lack legal legitimacy, and legal frameworks sometimes fail to account for the practical challenges of obtaining and analysing that data.
Over the next four years, the project will explore and develop integrated “technolegal” tools that combine computational access methods (like scraping, reverse engineering, or data donation) with legal mechanisms such as those introduced by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and similar reforms elsewhere.
Early output
So far, the project has achieved several early outputs. A team at St. Gallen has developed SOAP (System for Observing and Analyzing Posts), an open-source system that can detect and measure the presence of filter bubbles in social media contexts. In Lausanne and Maastricht, researchers have carried out a quantitative analysis of a large corpus of platform transparency reports, examining how well existing reporting requirements address systemic risks related to control and data concentration. At ODI, work has begun to build a network through webinars and workshops, bringing together stakeholders across academia, civil society and policy-making to share findings and foster collaboration.
The societal implications of CoCoDa are significant. By bridging technical capabilities with legal mandates, the project aims to make platform transparency and accountability actionable. This could help regulators, researchers, and civil society to monitor content moderation, privacy practices, and recommender-system dynamics more effectively.
The project is a collaboration bringing together expertise from the University of St. Gallen (Simon Mayer, Luka Bekavac), the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab (Konrad Kollnig, Gijs van Dijck, Henry Tari), the University of Lausanne (Aurelia Tamo-Larrieux, Alice Palmieri), and the Open Data Institute (Elena Simperl, Calum Inverarity, Jake Stein, Sophia Worth).
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