Researchers studying Facebook’s impact on democracy threaten to quit
Researchers studying Facebook’s impact on democracy threaten to
quit
By Reuters August 28, 2019 | 1:50pm
SAN FRANCISCO — A group of philanthropies
working with Facebook to study the social network’s impact on democracy
threatened on Tuesday to quit, saying the company had failed to make data
available to researchers as pledged.
The funders said in a statement that Facebook
had granted the 83 scholars selected for the project access to “only a portion
of what they were told they could expect,” which made it impossible for some to
carry out their research.
They have given Facebook until Sept. 30 to
provide the data.
Their concerns focus on the absence of data
that would show which web pages were shared on Facebook as far back as January
2017.
The company had yet to say when the data would
be made available, the funders added.
Facebook said in a statement that it remained
committed to the project and would “continue to provide access to data and
tooling to all grant recipients — current and future.”
The announcement comes only a few months after
Facebook launched the research program, which opened the company’s propriety
data to independent scholars for the first time.
Data access was meant to be heavily
controlled, with special precautions to protect user privacy.
The funding consortium includes both the
conservative Charles Koch Foundation and Silicon Valley’s Omidyar Network.
“We hope Facebook (not to mention other
platform companies) will find a way to provide deeply robust privacy-protected
data,” they said, as “independent scholarly analysis of social media platforms
is essential” to understanding elections and democracy around the world.
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