While criticizing social media companies for invading user privacy, some university researchers and nonprofit organizations are pushing for access to the same data collected by those companies—arguing that such info is crucial to understanding how to combat domestic extremism. Researchers and activists made their case for more access to social media data at an Oct. 28 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on social media and domestic extremism. Their calls follow the release of the Facebook Files—a trove of internal records that reportedly show, among other things, the company’s failure to control the spread of radicalizing content. According to the researchers, they need to see how Facebook and other social media users are interacting with content so they can better understand the phenomenon of domestic extremism. “The key types of datasets that should be made available relate to ‘who’ viewed or engaged with what content, when and how,” Nathaniel Persily, co-director …