Enabling Researchers is a Moral Imperative

Enabling researchers is deemed a moral obligation, even by small companies, due to the trend of internet platforms returning to closed systems. As Rachelle Faust and Daniel Arnaudo stated in "The World’s Growing Information Black Box: Inequity in Platform Research" (2025), platforms prioritize cost reduction over independent data access.

The attacks on Rohingya people in Myanmar in 2015, fueled by Facebook posts, prompted criticism and calls for increased platform transparency. However, there's an additional benefit: independent research can yield unique customer insights and expose hidden truths. Larger corporations prefer hiring costly consultants rather than maintaining researcher access.

This gives small and medium-sized organizations an edge. As the subscription marketplace becomes more concentrated, investing in networks becomes crucial for resilience and data value. Yorba, a small company, is opening its platform to researchers from the Nova School of Business and Economics, Daniela Schmitt and Rodrigo Belo, and organizations like the Association of Internet Researchers and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.

They emphasize the importance of data integrity and open vocabularies, such as Atlas, for serving data in various contexts. Data labeling and tagging help maintain data quality over time. Yorba also enforces strong data semantics to prevent unauthorized access. By opening up data, Yorba aims to contribute to a fairer and more open technological landscape, where the pendulum swings back towards openness after a long period of enclosure.