“Jennifer Jacquet, a social scientist at New York University who has studied how companies have undermined the scientific consensus on climate change, says collaborating with prestigious scientists is part of the playbook companies employ when threatened with regulation. “I think this is all part of the strategy of buying time, against any regulation, which they’ve been very good at doing,” she says. “There’s no doubt that these scientists [are] lending their credibility to these companies themselves and that would make me a little bit uncomfortable.”
But unless companies are forced to share their data, there are few ways to study them without collaborating, says Freelon. “Absent some outside enforcer, we are at their mercy and that’s just how it is.”
Michael Wagner, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was asked to observe the work and wrote a commentary accompanying the Science papers , says Meta’s business interests may have influenced the project at some points. For instance, he says Meta researchers believed that the experimental studies changing users’ feeds were unlikely to show any big effects—and they pushed to get these papers done first. “You could read it as ‘the big splash is going to be that there aren’t huge effects that are so deleterious to democracy that we need to have a bunch of new regulations on our platform.’””
