The professor was incredulous. David Craig had been studying the rise of entertainment on social media for several years when a Facebook Inc. employee he didn’t know emailed him last December, asking about his research. “I thought I was being pumped,” Craig said. The company flew him to Menlo Park and offered him $25,000 to fund his ongoing projects, with no obligation to do anything in return. This was definitely not normal, but after checking with his school, University of Southern California, Craig took the gift. “Hell, yes, it was generous to get an out-off-the-blue offer to support our work, with no strings,” he said. “It’s not all so black and white that they are villains.”
Other academics got these gifts, too. One, who said she had $25,000 deposited in her research account recently without signing a single document, spoke to a reporter hoping maybe the journalist could help explain it. Another professor said one of his former students got an unsolicited monetary offer from Facebook, and he had to assure the recipient it wasn’t a scam. The professor surmised that Facebook uses the gifts as a low-cost way to build connections that could lead to closer collaboration later. He also thinks Facebook “happily lives in the ambiguity” of the unusual arrangement. If researchers truly understood that the funding has no strings, “people would feel less obligated to interact with them,” he said.
The free gifts are just one of the little-known and complicated ways Facebook works with academic researchers. For scholars, the scale of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users provides an irresistible way to investigate how human nature may play out on, and be shaped by, the social network. For Facebook, the motivations to work with outside academics are far thornier, and it’s Facebook that decides who gets access to its data to examine its impact on society.“Just from a business standpoint, people won't want to be on Facebook if Facebook is not positive for them in their lives,” said Rob Sherman, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer. “We also have a broader responsibility to make sure that we’re having the right impact on society.”
The company’s long been conflicted about how to work with social scientists, and now runs several programs, each reflecting the contorted relationship Facebook has with external scrutiny. The collaborations have become even more complicated in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was set off by revelations that a professor who once collaborated with Facebook’s in-house researchers used data collected separately to influence elections.
“Historically the focus of our research has been on product development, on doing things that help us understand how people are using Facebook and build improvements to Facebook,” Sherman said. Facebook’s heard more from academics and nonprofits recently who say “because of the expertise that we have, and the data that Facebook stores, we have an opportunity to contribute to generalizable knowledge and to answer some of these broader social questions,” he said. “So you’ve seen us begin to invest more heavily in social science research and in answering some of these questions.”
Facebook has a corporate culture that reveres research. The company builds its product based on internal data on user behavior, surveys and focus groups. More than a hundred Ph.D.-level researchers work on Facebook’s in-house core data science team, and employees say the information that points to growth has had more of an impact on the company's direction than Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas.
Facebook is far more hesitant to work with outsiders; it risks unflattering findings, leaks of proprietary information, and privacy breaches. But Facebook likes it when external research proves that Facebook is great. And in the fierce talent wars of Silicon Valley, working with professors can make it easier to recruit their students.
It can also improve the bottom line. In 2016, when Facebook changed the “like” button into a set of emojis that better captured user expression—and feelings for advertisers— it did so with the help of Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s an expert in compassion and emotions. And this January, Facebook made research the centerpiece of a major change to its news feed algorithm. In studies published with academics at several universities, Facebook found that people who used social media actively—commenting on friends' posts, setting up events—were likely to see a positive impact on mental health, while those who used it passively may feel depressed. In reaction, Facebook declared it would spend more time encouraging "meaningful interaction." Of course, the more people engage with Facebook, the more data it collects for advertisers.
The company has stopped short of pursuing deeper research on potentially negative fallout of its power. According to its public database of published research, Facebook’s written more than 180 public papers about artificial intelligence but just one study about elections, based on an experiment Facebook ran on 61 million users to mobilize voters in the Congressional midterms back in 2010. Facebook’s Sherman said, “We’ve certainly been doing a lot of work over the past couple of months, particularly to expand the areas where we’re looking.”
Facebook’s first peer-reviewed papers with outside scholars were published in 2009, and almost a decade into producing academic work, it still wavers over how to structure the arrangements. It’s given out the smaller unrestricted gifts. But those gifts don’t come with access to Facebook’s data, at least initially. The company is more restrictive about who can mine or survey its users. It looks for research projects that dovetail with its business goals.