COME on Facebook, give us the evidence. Months after the company said it would hand over data to help determine if the social media site really can affect election results, we are still waiting. Now it looks as if the whole project could collapse.
Facebook’s electoral influence has come under much scrutiny in recent years. Accusations of fake news, allegations of state meddling and the use of private data for political purposes in the Cambridge Analytica scandal have knocked the company’s image.
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It acknowledged as much in April 2018 when it announced that it would allow researchers to study social media’s impact on elections using anonymised user data. “The last two years have taught us that the same Facebook tools that help politicians connect with their constituents… can also be misused to manipulate and deceive,” the firm wrote in a blog post.
The question is: how much? Just because people see a political post or advert on Facebook doesn’t mean it affects how they think or vote – even if they share, comment on or “like” it. Studies before have shown correlations. Facebook’s offer seemed to promise the data for a full post-match analysis.
In April this year, the , a US non-profit organisation administering the initiative, announced the first research projects. They included one looking at the impact of people sharing fake news, another measuring the extent of disinformation campaigns by the Internet Research Agency in Russia and a third assessing the spread of polarised content. The projects span elections in countries from Europe, Asia, North America and South America.
Yet, months on, researchers are still waiting for much of the data. Now, as , the SSRC has said that unless the data is handed over by 30 September, the funders backing the project will withdraw.
Nobody said this was going to be easy. There are privacy laws to navigate – Facebook cites the recent EU data protection regulations, GDPR, as . Issues around how anonymous anonymised information actually is means that if Facebook gives away too much data, it could easily be linked to individuals, but if it doesn’t give enough the data won’t be useful.
The company has had its fingers burned before, too. It used to be easy for researchers to get their hands on Facebook data. Privacy breaches and the Cambridge Analytica affair were the result.
Those stumbling blocks shouldn’t derail the project. More than 2 billion people use Facebook each month and the alleged influence on elections cuts to the heart of democratic values. Facebook has just over a month to put its best brains on the case. It should share as much data as possible, being transparent in how it does so, while still maintaining people’s privacy.
If there are genuinely unsolvable issues with sharing the data, the public deserves to know: in its public statements so far, . The firm’s motto was once to “move fast and break things”. Now that things are broken, will it move fast to fix them?
