Facebook Joins With Researchers to Study Its Influence on Elections

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 [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 31, 2020 17:41 ET (21:41 GMT)

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