Facebook Joins With Researchers to Study Its Influence on Elections
August 31 2020 - 5:56PM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. has long argued with critics about its
social-media platforms' effects on elections. On Monday, the
company announced a partnership to give independent researchers new
data to study the question.
A group led by professors from New York University and the
University of Texas at Austin will study how Facebook and Instagram
users in the U.S. engage on the platforms in the run-up to
elections in November. Facebook expects between 200,000 and 400,000
users to opt into participating in the research study.
The company will log what volunteers do and see on Facebook and
Instagram to provide researchers with aggregated behavioral data.
It will supplement that information with independent survey
research and by running experiments, including altering the mix of
ads that volunteers see in their newsfeeds.
"We're really leaning on getting the consent of users so we can
do this research," said Chaya Nayak, head of Facebook's Open
Research and Transparency Team. The company will handle volunteer
recruitment and consent, and instances where Facebook considers
data from users too sensitive to share with outside researchers,
the company's own researchers will process it at the academics'
request.
Facebook runs near-constant experiments involving its
content-ranking systems, but research on subjects like politics and
emotions has been historically sensitive. In 2014, the company
apologized after altering the content it presented to some users,
without their knowledge, to study the effect on their mood.
The new partnership is an offshoot of Social Science One,
Facebook's effort to build a privacy-safe data-sharing system with
academics. Launched two years ago, the initiative has produced some
published research but was bogged down by controversies over
multinational privacy laws and limitations Facebook placed on how
the data could be studied.
The lead academics in the latest venture, who were both involved
in Social Science One, say they learned from that experience and
have addressed some sticking points up front. A total of 17
university-affiliated researchers will be involved.
"The data we need -- for now, anyway -- is owned by giant
social-media platforms," said NYU professor Joshua Tucker, who is
leading the effort along with University of Texas at Austin
professor Natalie Stroud. "A huge advantage of what we're doing is
that we participated in the research design of the project."
As with Social Science One, Facebook won't provide any funding
to the academics and will have no say in what they eventually
publish. Prof. Stroud said Facebook was the only major platform to
provide such access ahead of the U.S. elections this year, though
research results wouldn't be published until the second half of
2021.
Facebook's involvement in the work is notable because its
leadership has largely rejected concerns that its platforms might
be harmful.
After The Wall Street Journal reported on the company's past
restrictions on internal efforts to study how Facebook might be
driving polarization and insufficiently mitigating potential harms,
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has argued that evidence of
Facebook's divisive effects is weak and outweighed by its positive
effects.
The new project aims to give outsiders additional information to
draw their own conclusions. The research will focus on political
participation and polarization, knowledge and misperceptions as
well as trust in U.S. democratic institutions, Prof. Stroud
said.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 31, 2020 17:41 ET (21:41 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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