[Air-L] ICYMI: Steven Levy on Social Science Foo Camp

[Joly MacFie]

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-social-network-becomes-social-science-subject/


*The Social Network Becomes a Social Science Subject*

*STEVEN LEVY  *
The Plain View

Last weekend I attended an event called Social Science Foo Camp, an
“unconference” where attendees spontaneously schedule discussion sessions
to create a lively agenda. The venue was Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo
Park, California. One of the more interesting sessions I attended concerned
a project called Social Science One <https://socialscience.one/>.

Social Science One is an effort to get the Holy Grail of data sets into the
hands of private researchers. That Holy Grail is Facebook data. Yep, that
same unthinkably massive trove that brought us Cambridge Analytica.

In the Foo Camp session, Stanford Law School’s Nate Persily, cohead of
Social Science One, said that after 20 months of negotiations, Facebook was
finally releasing the data to researchers. (The researchers had thought all
of that would be settled in two months.) A Facebook data scientist who
worked on the team dedicated to this project beamed in confirmation.
Indeed, the official announcement came a few days later.

It’s an unprecedented drop, involving a data set of 10 trillion numbers.
The information centers on URLs shared by Facebook’s billions of
users—specifically, the 38 million of these that were shared more than 100
times on Facebook between January 1, 2017, and July 31, 2019. Researchers
can isolate URLs by characteristics like whether they were fact-checked or
flagged as hate speech, and they can see (in the aggregate) who viewed
them, liked them, shared them, or even whether they shared the links
without viewing them. “This dataset enables social scientists to study some
of the most important questions of our time about the effects of social
media on democracy and elections with information to which they have never
before had access,” reads the Social Science One press release.
<https://socialscience.one/blog/unprecedented-facebook-urls-dataset-now-available-research-through-social-science-one>

The reason it took so long is that Facebook, quite understandably, wanted
to protect the privacy of its users. Simply aggregating the information so
that no individual’s activity can be identified wasn’t enough for Facebook,
which insisted on also encoding the data via a technology called
differential privacy. It’s a great way to protect privacy, but because it
works by adding digital noise to the data set to prevent exposure of
individuals, the technique limits what research can be done. The Social
Science One people think Facebook is excessively cautious. “But I didn’t
just get a $5 billion fine from the FTC,” acknowledges Persily, referring
to the penalty assessed on Facebook last summer for its privacy sins.

This is a new chapter in the somewhat tortured history of Facebook data
research. The company hires top data scientists, sociologists, and
statisticians, but their primary job is not to conduct academic research,
it’s to use research to improve Facebook’s products and promote growth.
These internal researchers sometimes do publish their findings, but after a
disastrous 2014 Facebook study
<https://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebooks-manipulative-experiment/>
that
involved showing users negative posts to see if their mood was affected,
the company became super cautious about what it shared publicly. So this
week’s data drop really is a big step in transparency, especially since
there’s some likelihood that the researchers may discover uncomfortable
truths about the way Facebook spreads lies and misinformation.

The Foo Camp session was packed with researchers from inside and outside of
Facebook, and there was a heady ebullience. You could almost hear the
virtual popping of champagne. *Finally, the public will get its shot at the
treasure trove,* the feeling went.

Yet I suspect that the actual users of Facebook might not be so excited.
They don’t use the service so they can participate in experiments or
contribute to research, and they don’t get to opt out of these studies.
While Social Science One touts the benefit to society of slicing and dicing
the data to gain insights, no one is benefiting more than the researchers
themselves—their papers are going to be awesome! So, at the risk of turning
the room against me, I posed the question: "Why should Facebook be turning
over its data to outsiders?"

Persily had a compelling answer: “We are now living in a society where the
most important data relating to data and communications is locked up in one
company.” It’s for the good of everyone, he says, for academics to get
their hands on it.

All of this begs another question: Why does Facebook’s
mother-of-all-data-sets exist at all? Pending resolution of that matter, I
await the conclusions of the Social Science One researchers.

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Joly MacFie  +2185659365
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