Facebook to Help Research on the Impact of Social Media on Elections
The social media giant also informed that 60 research scholars from 30 academic institutions across 11 countries of the world were selected after a review process by the Social Science Research Council and the independent group Social Science One for the task.
Facebook has recently declared that it is going to make its data available to the academics who are studying the impact of social media on elections, in an effort to prevent manipulation of social platforms.
The social media giant also informed that 60 research scholars from 30 academic institutions across 11 countries of the world were selected after a review process by the Social Science Research Council and the independent group Social Science One for the task.
Facebook has started working on the research initiative last year after revelations of the foreign influence in the campaigns during the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit vote in Britain came out in media platforms, but unveiled its first research grants recently.
Facebook executives Elliot Schrage and Chaya Nayak in a blog post said, “To assure the independence of the research and the researchers, Facebook did not play any role in the selection of the research scholars or their projects and will have no role in directing the findings or conclusions of the research”.
They also wrote, “We hope this initiative will help public understanding about the role social media platform has on elections and democracy and help Facebook and other companies improve their products and practices”.
In this research initiative, the researchers will be allowed to access Facebook’s internal data through a “first-of-its-kind data sharing infrastructure to provide researchers access to Facebook data in a secure manner that protects people’s privacy”, said Schrage and Nayak in the blog post.
Meanwhile, Gary King and Nathaniel Persily of Social Science One said in a statement that the researchers would seek to move swiftly to help social networks improve their security and integrity.
They said in the statement that, “Elections in India are already underway, the European Parliamentary elections will take place in short order, and the US presidential primary campaigns have begun in earnest. Concerns about disinformation, political advertising, polarization and the role of the platforms in the information ecosystem have not diminished. If anything, they have heightened”.
The 60 research scholars were selected from 4 universities in the US, 1 from France, 1 from Taiwan, 1 from Brazil, 1 from Italy, 1 from Germany, 1 from Netherlands and 1 from Chile and the fund for the research will come from many other organizations too which also includes the Democracy Fund, the Charles Koch Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network.
