Social Science One

Social Science One is a Facebook research organization based administratively at Harvard University. Co-charied by Gary King, and Nathaniel Persily,[1] Social Science One is designed as a corporate and academic partnership.[2] At its launch, Vox reported that Facebook established Social Science One to prevent future events similar to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and also as a public relations response to that problem.[3]

Data and applications

In 2018, Social Science One described the data as being about a petabyte of data, with part being user profiles presenting the country of their location, age, brand of device they use to engage, ideological affiliation, their ratio of friends to non-friends reading their posts, and various metrics associated with the Facebook like button.[4] The data also includes the URLs of various posts, typically 300 million per week, for a sum of 30 billion in this initial shared dataset.[4]

Twelve research projects were announced in 2019.[5][6]

Controversy

In August 2019 BuzzFeed noted that Social Science One had not fulfilled its commitment to share the data it promised 16 months earlier.[7] Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and Omidyar Network gave Facebook deadline to share data and threatened to pull out of the project because of the delay.[8][9]

On December 11, 2019, the Co-Chairs and European Advisory Committee of Social Science One made a public statement "The current situation is untenable. Heated public and political discussions are waged over the role and responsibilities of platforms in today’s societies, and yet researchers cannot make fully informed contributions to these discussions. We are mostly left in the dark, lacking appropriate data to assess potential risks and benefits. This is not an acceptable situation for scientific knowledge. It is not an acceptable situation for our societies".[10][11]

References
  1. Nieva, Richard (11 July 2018). "Social Science One group will study Facebook's effect on elections". CNET.
  2. King, Gary; Persily, Nathaniel (19 August 2019). "A New Model for Industry–Academic Partnerships". PS: Political Science & Politics: 1–7. doi:10.1017/S1049096519001021.
  3. Stewart, Emily (1 May 2019). "Facebook is sharing data to figure out how it messes with democracy". Vox.
  4. Coldewey, Devin (July 11, 2018). "Facebook independent research commission, Social Science One, will share a petabyte of user interactions". TechCrunch.
  5. Social Science Research Council (14 April 2020). "Social Media and Democracy Research Grants". Social Science Research Council.
  6. Kastrenakes, Jacob (6 May 2019). "12 new projects will finally show us how Facebook is changing democracy". The Verge.
  7. Silverman, Craig (August 22, 2019). "Facebook Said It Would Give Detailed Data To Academics. They're Still Waiting". BuzzFeed News.
  8. "Funders Are Ready To Pull Out Of Facebook's Academic Data Sharing Project". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 2019-10-18.
  9. Ingram, Mathew (Fall 2019). "Silicon Valley's Stonewalling". Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
  10. "Public statement from the Co-Chairs and European Advisory Committee of Social Science One". socialscience.one. Retrieved 2019-12-11.
  11. Doctorow, Cory (12 December 2019). "Facebook promised to provide academics data to study disinformation, but their foot-dragging has endangered the whole project". Boing Boing.
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