Academics are still waiting to receive key data originally promised in 2018 from Facebook, which has declined to provide some of the data citing privacy fears
In 2018, Facebook announced a partnership to provide data to academics to “help people better understand the broader impact …
BuzzFeed NewsCraig Silverman
Context & Ripple Effects
When Facebook announced in 2018 it would hand researchers data on the platform's broader societal impact, the [[a:941141|deal covered 60+ academics worldwide but carved out the run-up to the 2016 US election and Brexit]] — the exact periods most in demand. Fifteen months later, even that narrowed window remains largely undelivered, with Facebook withholding portions of what it promised on privacy grounds.
The standoff matters because it defines who gets to audit a platform whose own internal record is otherwise the only source of truth. The eventual resolution proved the point: the [[a:950607|dataset Social Science One and Facebook finally shipped arrived two years late at roughly 38M URLs]], and later reporting revealed the [[a:970562|misinformation data actually covered about half of US users, not all as Facebook had claimed]].
First-order effects
Academics in the partnership cannot study the platform effects they were assembled to examine, and Facebook alone decides which slices of its data clear the privacy bar.
Second-order effects
Every partial or delayed release raises the evidentiary burden on the researchers' published findings, forcing them to caveat conclusions drawn from samples Facebook itself scoped — a credibility problem for the industry-partnered research model as a whole.
Third-order effects
If volunteer partnerships keep producing curated, incomplete datasets, the likely endgame is external compulsion — regulators or legislatures mandating researcher data access instead of trusting the platform's discretion over its own permission boundary.
The trend: Platform-controlled research access is giving way to contested disclosure, where each incomplete delivery strengthens the case for mandated data transparency.
Scoop from me: Facebook's partnership to provide platform data to academics is in trouble. Researchers are still waiting to receive key data, funders are getting nervous, and no one knows when the full data sets will be available: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
We're now seeing the tangible results of the “Transparency Paradox” (https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...). Solutions to our social media problems require transperency and security at the same time... But, we're finding that's easier said than done. It's not just technical. Ince…
Efforts like this truly aren't just “academic”—they're important for bringing tech companies into the realm of accountability to the public. No segment of our societies should be above democratic accountability, and right now the information balance tips entirely to big tech. htt…
It might appear “unbalanced” to former Facebook executives, and to (some) researchers who think they and their students should get access to whatever their institutional ethics boards will nod through. Two billion Facebook users might have other ideas https://twitter.com/...
Facebook announced this effort at transparency to provide data to researchers on April 9th, 2018... the day before Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill. It was just another cynical PR effort by an utterly venal company. https://twitter.com/...
This project is struggling because they have no credible independent leverage, and now are subject to Facebook's whims and internal politics. This is why credible independence matters and why the data governance design deserved a lot more attention. https://medium.com/... https:/…
FB is emphatic that it's committed to Social Science One. It has 20 people working on it and says the delays are because it's hard and they have set a high privacy and security standard.
“I think the only way to feel reasonably confident about this project is if you ignore what's happened over the past 16 months. If you step back and look where we started and where we are it's a pretty big step-down,” a source said. Ppl want it to work but some are losing faith.
The issues with Social Science One fit into a pattern of problems with Facebook's big transparency initiatives over the past 2.5 years. Delays, walkbacks, incomplete products, lack of disclosure. Think fact checking, Clear History, ads archive etc. pic.twitter.com/9tyOkLpc3u
Since the project on “2018 Italian election” is also mentioned here, I'll take the chance to deliver a quick update on what @mine_2018 team is doing with data and tools provided by the @ssrc_org @SocSciOne @facebook initiative. https://twitter.com/...
Lots of interesting threads circulating after @CraigSilverman 's piece for Buzzfeed dropped about FB's molasses progress in sharing promised data with outside researchers. Here's one about how hard it is as a researcher to study FB. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook has wasted the time of dozens if not hundreds of academics who study social media, promising them data to study the platform through the Social Science One initiative. Now they seem to be chickening out. https://twitter.com/...
This is a really important story that highlights the fact that social media is becoming MORE opaque to research. What's missing is the recognition that @BuzzFeedNews and other outlets have effectively been pushing for this outcome by their unbalanced reporting on privacy. https:/…
“Stamos' characterization of the scandal as ‘misuse of an API by an academic’ belies the fact that Facebook intentionally designed a system in which a single user was authorized to consent to the release of data belonging to thousands of other users.” https://gizmodo.com/...
what's missing from this criticism is proper context, IE: a decade of disregard for user privacy and a profound lack of transparency about how our personal data is used, stretching all the way back to beacon in 2007 and including cambridge analytica, free VPN provider Onavo, etc.…