Some academics cycle through one-year fellowships while pursuing doctorate degrees, and others get paid for consulting projects, which never get published.
When Facebook does provide data to researchers, it retains the right to veto or edit the paper before publication. None of the professors Bloomberg spoke with knew of cases when Facebook prohibited a publication, though many said the arrangement inevitably leads academics to propose investigations less likely to be challenged. “Researchers focus on things that don’t create a moral hazard,” said Dean Eckles, a former Facebook data scientist now at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Without a guaranteed right to publish, Eckles said, researchers inevitably shy away from potentially critical work. That means some of the most burning societal questions may go unprobed.
Facebook also almost always pairs outsiders with in-house researchers. This ensures scholars have a partner who’s intimately familiar with Facebook’s vast data, but some who’ve worked with Facebook say this also creates a selection bias about what gets studied. “Stuff still comes out, but only the immensely positive, happy stories—the goody-goody research that they could show off,” said one social scientist who worked as a researcher at Facebook. For example, he pointed out that the company’s published widely on issues related to well-being, or what makes people feel good and fulfilled, which is positive for Facebook’s public image and product. "The question is: ‘What’s not coming out?,’” he said.
Facebook argues its body of work on well-being does have broad importance. “Because we are a social product that has large distribution within society, it is both about societal issues as well as the product,” said David Ginsberg, Facebook’s director of research.Other social networks have smaller research ambitions, but have tried more open approaches. This spring, Twitter Inc. asked for proposals to measure the health of conversations on its platform, and Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn is running a multi-year program to have researchers use its data to understand how to improve the economic opportunities of workers. Facebook has issued public calls for technical research, but until the past few months, hasn’t done so for social sciences. Yet it has solicited in that area, albeit quietly: Last summer, one scholarly association begged discretion when sharing information on a Facebook pilot project to study tech’s impact in developing economies. Its email read, “Facebook is not widely publicizing the program.”
In 2014, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a massive study, co-authored by two Facebook researchers and an outside academic, that found emotions were “contagious” online, that people who saw sad posts were more likely to make sad posts. The catch: the results came from an experiment run on 689,003 Facebook users, where researchers secretly tweaked the algorithm of Facebook’s news feed to show some cheerier content than others. People were angry, protesting that they didn’t give Facebook permission to manipulate their emotions.
The company first said people allowed such studies by agreeing to its terms of service, and then eventually apologized. While the academic journal didn’t retract the paper, it issued an “Editorial Expression of Concern.”
To get federal research funding, universities must run testing on humans through what’s known as an institutional review board, which includes at least one outside expert, approves the ethics of the study and ensures subjects provide informed consent. Companies don’t have to run research through IRBs. The emotional-contagion study fell through the cracks.
The outcry profoundly changed Facebook’s research operations, creating a review process that was more formal and cautious. It set up a pseudo-IRB of its own, which doesn’t include an outside expert but does have policy and PR staff. Facebook also created a new public database of its published research, which lists more than 470 papers. But that database now has a notable omission—a December 2015 paper two Facebook employees co-wrote with Aleksandr Kogan, the professor at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook said it believes the study was inadvertently never posted and is working to ensure other papers aren't left off in the future.
In March, Gary King, a Harvard University political science professor, met with some Facebook executives about trying to get the company to share more data with academics. It wasn't the first time he'd made his case, but he left the meeting with no commitment.
A few days later, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, and soon Facebook was on the phone with King. Maybe it was time to cooperate, at least to understand what happens in elections. Since then, King and a Stanford University law professor have developed a complicated new structure to give more researchers access to Facebook’s data on the elections and let scholars publish whatever they find. The resulting structure is baroque, involving a new “commission” of scholars Facebook will help pick, an outside academic council that will award research projects, and seven independent U.S. foundations to fund the work. “Negotiating this was kind of like the Arab-Israel peace treaty, but with a lot more partners,” King said.