Why Researchers Want Broader Access to Social Media Data

Within days of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, several social media companies took steps to reduce the circulation of Russian state-backed media and anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Meta (formerly Facebook), for example, said it took down about 40 accounts, part of a larger network that had already spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Russian social media. The accounts used fake personas, replete with profile pictures likely generated with artificial intelligence, posing as news editors, engineers, and scientists in Kyiv. The people behind the network also created phony news websites that portrayed Ukraine as a failed state betrayed by the West.

Have become pervasive in the vast realm of social media. Will technology companies’ recent efforts to combat propaganda be effective? Because outsiders are not privy to most of the inner workings of the handful of companies that run the digital world — the details of where information originates, how it spreads, and how it affects the real world — it’s hard to know.

Tucker directs New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and co-directs the school’s Center for Social Media and Politics. When we spoke in mid-March, he had just come from a meeting with colleagues how to trace the spread of Russian state narratives in Western media. But that investigation — most of his research, in fact — is hampered because, in the name of protecting user privacy and intellectual property, social media companies do not share all the details of the algorithms they use to manipulate what you see when you enter their world, nor most of the data they collect while you’re there. For understanding how that manipulated world affects individuals and society, have never been higher. In recent years, journalists, researchers, and even company insiders have accused platforms of allowing hate speech and extremism to flourish, particularly on the far right. Last October, Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, testified before a US Senate Committee that the company prioritizes profits over safety. “The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world,” she said in her opening remarks. “In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people.” In the United States, answers about whether Facebook and Instagram impacted the 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection may come from a project Tucker co-directs, involving a collaboration between Meta and 16 additional outside researchers. It’s research that, for now, couldn’t be done any other way, said project member Deon Freeload, an associate professor at the Hussain School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina. “But it absolutely is not independent research because the Facebook researchers are holding our hands metaphorically in terms of what we can and can’t do.” Tucker and Freeload, are among scores of researchers and journalists calling for greater access to social media data, even if that requires new laws that would incentivize or force companies to share information. Questions about whether, say, Instagram worsens body image issues for teenage girls or YouTube sucks people into conspiracies may only be satisfactorily answered by outsiders. “Facilitating more independent research will allow the inquiry to go to the places it needs to go, even if that ends up making the company look bad in some instances,” said Freeload, who is also a principal researcher at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life. For now, a handful of giant for-profit companies control how much the public knows about what goes on in the digital world, said Tucker. While the companies can initiate cool research collaborations, he said, they can also shut those collaborations down at any time. “Always, always, always you are at the whim of the platforms,” he said. When it comes to data access, he added, “this is not where we want to be as a society.” Tucker recalled the early days of social media research about a decade ago as brimming with the promise. The new type of communication generated a treasure trove of information to mine for answers about human thoughts and behavior. But that initial excitement has faded a bit as Twitter turned out to be the only company consistently open to data sharing. As a result, studies about the platform dominate research, even though Twitter has far fewer users than most other networks. And even this research has limitations, said Tucker. He can’t find out the number of people who see a tweet, for example, information he needs to more accurately gauge impact. He rattled off a list of the other information he can’t get to. “We don’t know what YouTube is recommending to people,” he said. TikTok, owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, is notoriously closed to research, although it shares more of users’ information with outside companies than any other major platform according to a recent analysis by the mobile marketing company URL Genius. The world’s most popular social network, Facebook, makes very little data public, said Tucker. The company’s free tool allows you to track public posts, for example. But you still can’t find out the number of people who see a post or read comments, nor glean precise demographic information. In a phone call and email with Unbars, Meta spokesperson Mavis Jones contested that characterization of the company, stating that Meta actually supplies more research data than most of its competitors.