Facebook will give researchers new data to study election interference


Today, Facebook announced a new research initiative partnering with seven prominent nonprofit foundations to study the effect of social media on elections. Under the new initiative, social science researchers will propose research projects for peer review. If the proposal is approved, the researchers will receive the anonymized data from Facebook and accompanying funding from the foundations.

Crucially, Facebook “will not have any right to review or approve their research findings prior to publication,” although it may have influence over which projects are approved.

In an accompanying Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that the effort was intended as a response to the Russian influence campaigns that targeted the 2016...

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via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2IACh4b"

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