[Air-L] Facebook Data Collection: app review

[Shulman, Stu]

Let me second the request(s) for information about experiences with recent
requests for Facebook data access as well as Social Science One. I will be
in Menlo Park visiting Facebook Monday for a meeting. If you have useful
questions or experiences to share, it might help advance the discussion.
Most of what we know in detail is about being #lockedout of "Premium" and
historical Twitter.

We have hit a major wall trying to offer academic and technical support in
the identification of problematic and threatening multilingual content,
despite significant discussions in 2018 with Facebook personnel on the
topic. Who on the AoIR list has stories of being #allowedin to study
Facebook data or to work with them improve the way FB meets its most
significant challenges?

One hunch I have (with sparse evidence) is that the only way to be allowed
back in now (apart from SS1) is on the back of collaboration with a
non-profit or commercial customer (not a software vendor); that is, as an
academic or a team attached to a non-profit or corporation that spends
money on Facebook. This is not how we have operated, but it appears some
analytics firms do get to the data this way, via their customer, and we are
exploring it now with Apple, Adobe, and some others with actual power with
respect to the platforms. There is a double edge, always, when you go to
the powerful to ask for help.

Nonetheless, it may be that to study Facebook going forward, academics need
to rethink their idea of private partnerships, funding sources, and how to
frame a study that Facebook can enthusiastically support. The same was true
when we were originally going to the NSF or NIH for funding digital
government or digital health research twenty years ago (yes, all this work
in my life began in Small Grant for Exploratory Research, SGER, back in the
fall of 1999). Gatekeepers exist (public and private) and they have a map
that shows where access and choke points are. I would say the map has
changed as have the gatekeepers, but most of us are in the dark even if we
once thought we were preternaturally inside the machine itself.

There is a serious information disparity in play about the research
landscape and it is worthwhile to keep reminding those on the inside (with
current access to data) they are better off with more rather than fewer
legitimate studies. I am speculating, but 2019 is probably the last year I
am going to try and crack this nut, which is very tough indeed. It was a
decade ago we linked up to the Open Graph API because Mark Z told us the
information needed to be free. Definitely there are/were issues that
complete openness with inadequate IRB policies in place have generated.
Perhaps if leadership in the association of IRBs (is there one?) sent a
senior delegation to Facebook, some ground rules could be set by a broader
group than the gatekeepers at Social Science One.

Finally, looking back, Dr. Charli Carpenter & I saw a lot of this coming in
2010 when we created "MarkZism: Tyranny or Transcendence?" though (mea
culpa) we definitely misunderstood Julian Assange at the time. Our animated
debate is here:

https://youtu.be/PEQQ9r0aC34

~Stu

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 3:04 PM Alexandre Leroux <alleroux at ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Dear colleges,
>
> I'm looking for feedback from researchers working on Facebook who
> tried/passed App Review process. How did it went? Was it successful? Did
> you fill it stating your research purpose or a more generic aim?
>
> My feeling is that FB might be hostile to academic research on its
> ground but maybe some of you experienced the opposite?
>
> Our current project requires downloading a large amount of post and
> comment from Pages and our API access is locked down since last December
> and we have yet to submit the review.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Alex
>
> --
>
> Leroux Alexandre
> Ph.D candidate
> Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality
> Université Libre de Bruxelles
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Cell: 413-992-8513
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartwshulman