Meta partners with the Center for Open Science to share data for researching online well-being, before January 31's Congressional hearing on kids' online safety
The data-sharing partnership puts research access alongside product safeguards as the company faces a congressional hearing focused on kids’ online safety. It matters because the debate increasingly turns on what outside researchers can establish about platform effects.
First-order effects
The Center for Open Science receives a channel to support research on online well-being using Meta-shared data, while Meta gains a concrete research initiative to point to during heightened scrutiny.
Researchers’ ability to examine platform-related well-being questions becomes less dependent on public-facing data alone, within the scope of the partnership.
Second-order effects
The initiative raises pressure on other large platforms to offer credible research access or explain why independent study of well-being remains constrained.
Findings produced through the partnership could shape how policymakers and advocates assess whether product-level youth-safety measures are sufficient.
Third-order effects
If similar arrangements become repeatable, controlled research access could become a core part of platform accountability, alongside parental tools and age-appropriate product design.
The trend: Youth-safety governance is shifting from platforms emphasizing protective features alone toward demands for evidence, researcher access, and accountable data-sharing rules.
While this partnership between Meta & @OSFramework is an exciting first-step in data access & transparency, let's hope in the long run this can go beyond a “a select group of academic researchers”. Some data access is good, but more data access is better https://www.cos.io/meta […
Meta is partnering with @OSFramework on a pilot program to share certain data with academic researchers, in a privacy-preserving way, so they can study topics related to well-being. https://www.cos.io/...
To me this reads rather like looking at the damage social media has done after having extracted untold billions from it. Something or other signalling.
Meta will give data access to to ‘a select group of researchers’. This definitely doesn't look like attempted academic capture or attempts to skew the evidence base on youth wellbeing, absolutely not.
We want to help everyone, especially young people, thrive. We're committed to transparency in this space and we're hopeful this type of work can be a model for other companies to take similar steps.
Meta's commitment to transparency has been dreadful, too often they excel at obfuscation and misdirection. Instead they should partner with all bona fide academic institutions and share the anonymised data needed for their research
Important for researchers in the social sciences and humanities (e.g., media and communication studies): ‘Meta Partners with the Center for Open Science to Share Data to Study Well-being Topics’ https://www.cos.io/...
Today, we announced a partnership with the Center for Open Science on a new pilot program to share certain data with researchers so they can study how different factors may or may not impact youth well-being. https://www.cos.io/...