On November 28-29, 2024, Linterna Verde organized a workshop in Bogotá with a group of members of civil society and academia to address the question of access to data from social media platforms for public interest digital research(see here for details about the event and guest profiles). This space sought to give continuity to a couple of previous conversations that Linterna Verde did during 2023.
During the workshop, a panel discussion was held with three of the participants (video available here). The reflections and conclusions of each one were recorded in three texts of the Network of Experts in Democracy and Technology of La Silla Vacía: 'Decolonizing data and narratives', 'Winning the qualitative without losing the massive', and 'The cause of fighting the data blackout'.
These exercises made it possible to approach the problem from different points of view, but also served to note the absence of an effort in the region to promote a common agenda.
The purpose of this document is to outline a roadmap for a joint initiative. To this end, we (i) describe the problem; (ii) emphasize the need for a differential approach for Latin America; and (iii) propose key elements for a short-term strategy.
This text gathers the workshop participants -as a rapporteur-, arguments from other documents and ideas from the articles mentioned above. In some sections we include textual quotations; in others, we paraphrase or make general statements. In any case, although this input does not pretend to be exhaustive nor does it represent a formal consensus, it reflects a plural perspective.
