Researchers have found that social media platforms, like Facebook, disproportionately amplify low-quality content and misinformation. However, a recent study funded by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, claims the platform’s algorithms have “no detectable impact on polarization, political attitudes or beliefs.” This article explores how big tech’s control over research and data access allows them to shape public perception and delay much-needed transparency and oversight.
Biased Research — An Illusion
In the last 10 years, researchers have been accumulating evidence that social media platforms — Facebook foremost among them — tend to disproportionately amplify low-quality content and misinformation. Therefore, the revelation in 2023 that Facebook’s trending algorithms had “no detectable impact on polarization, political attitudes or beliefs” during America’s election year of 2020 was astonishing.
(Co-authors of the paper included several Meta employees and others, such as Pennycook, who were doing similar research but were not directly funded by this study or any other Meta entity in relation to it.). This immediately elicited alarm bells over the objectivity and impartiality of the study. This was given some weight a few days later when researchers led by Chhandak Bagch from the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded that Facebook had probably been experimenting with its algorithm at the same time Amazon had been trying to collect its data. The original study’s authors acknowledged their findings could have been different had Facebook not temporarily altered its algorithm.
Huge Tech Dominance In Academia
Given the Meta-funded study debacle, there is a larger issue of the impact that big tech companies have on academic research. Platforms such as these are now pouring money into academic endeavor; big tobacco did, in the 1950s, to create confusion about smoking and its associated health effects.
Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to over 100 colleges and universities nationwide. The big tech companies are able to both control access to data and put their thumb on the scale of systems being studied, which obviously affects what gets found by the research they fund. In addition, these corporations can also support specific research campaigns on their platforms, this as a way to anticipate possible public rebukes and to create an atmosphere where skepticism related to malice from algorithms disappears.
Independent Oversight is Required
Big tech has more control to shape the narrative around how their platforms affect society than any other industry ever. Not even the tobacco companies were able to mold public opinion of themselves as well as today’s social media giants have.
This further highlights a critical need for more independent oversight of these platforms. Researchers need complete access to data, while social media companies should have to inform us in real time about changes made on their algorithmic systems. Whenever this happens we can understand the full impact of social media platforms and be able to hold them accountable.
Indeed, the profit can trump the people in big tech self-research funding models and respect for transparency and independent oversight is pushed aside. Dealing with these criticisms head-on, will help to ensure that research on the effects of social media is actually as fair and ethical; for the public interest.
