Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data 9/16/20, 9)34 PM

Facebook gives social scientists

unprecedented access to its user
data
Projects from around the world will delve into
questions such as how misinformation spreads on
social-media platforms and who distributes it.
03 May 2019

NEWS

Heidi Ledford

Supporters of presidential candidate Sebastian Piñera wave flags at a gathering during Chile's 2017 presidential
election.Credit: Sebastián Vivallo Oñate/Agencia Makro/Getty

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Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data 9/16/20, 9)34 PM

Facebook is giving social scientists unprecedented access to its data so

that they can investigate how social-media platforms can influence
elections and alter democracies.

The first group of projects selected for funding involves more than 60
researchers split into 12 teams. They will tackle questions such as how fake
news spreads, who distributes it and how to identify it. Their projects,
announced on 28 April, will focus on countries including Germany, Chile,
Italy and the United States.

The scientists will have access to reams of Facebook data, such as the
URLs that users have shared and demographic information including
gender and approximate age. The company — which has been accused of
privacy violations in the past — is developing new protections aimed at
shielding the identities of its users.

The research teams were chosen by the non-profit group Social Science
Research Council in Brooklyn, New York, and Social Science One, an
academic–industry partnership with ties to Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. A coalition of eight charitable organizations will
fund the work. Facebook had no say in selecting the projects.

The programme could set a precedent for how social scientists work with
companies to access information about social media, a growing force in
shaping public discourse, says Simon Hegelich, a political data scientist at
the Technical University of Munich in Germany. “Itʼs still a problem that
social media is so important — especially for social science — but we donʼt
have access to the data,” he says. “Sometimes you spend a lot of time
trying to find things out that were already known in companies.”

Worldwide webs
Hegelich leads a team that will study the spread of false information during
Germanyʼs 2017 general election, using data from Facebook and Twitter.

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The researchers already have a list of Twitter accounts implicated in

propagating misinformation during the 2016 presidential election in the
United States. They found that some of those accounts were also active in
Germany, and linked them to Facebook accounts with similar user names
and content.

The team will have access to Facebookʼs data on URLs that were shared
more than 100 times on the site to determine the scope of the false-
information campaign in Germany. Hegelich and his colleagues will try to
determine how many people shared links promoted by these accounts — as
well as the usersʼ genders and approximate ages. The researchers hope to
use their findings to identify other such misinformation efforts, if they exist.

The opportunity to combine data across social-media services is

particularly welcome, says Hegelich. Social scientists tend to analyse
information from one platform at a time, he says, but that doesnʼt reflect
how data flows in the real world. “You have information taken out of Twitter
and then shared again on Facebook,” Hegelich says.

The depth of access the project teams will have to Facebook data goes
beyond many previous studies, in which researchers were restricted to
more-limited data sets, says Michael Veale, who studies technology policy
at the Alan Turing Institute in London. And that raises questions about the
conclusions in those studies, he says. “Itʼs really good that Facebook — and
hopefully some other companies — are saying that we are aware that we
need to give researchers access to proper data sets within secure
environments.”

Zeroing in
Facebook wonʼt have a say in approving or blocking the publication of the
projectsʼ work — so even results that might cast the company in a negative
light will be shared, says Sebastián Valenzuela, who studies communication
at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago.
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He is co-leading a project on the spread of fake news on Facebook during

Chileʼs 2017 general election. The team hopes to quantify which
demographic groups of Chileans were most likely to be exposed to fake
news.

The project will be the first of its kind to concentrate on Chile, says
Valenzuela. “The evidence we have is mostly focused on the United States,”
he says. “Iʼm not so sure itʼs going to be applicable to countries in Latin
America.”

Veale is happy to see projects from around the world — but he is

disappointed that none of the studies focuses on India, the country with the
largest Facebook user base.

Geographic specificity might be particularly important as policymakers

grapple with how to handle disinformation campaigns, Valenzuela adds. “If
we donʼt understand the fake-news problem, the solutions weʼre developing
might not be the right ones,” he says.

doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-01447-5

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