Facebook said on Monday local time that it is collaborating with external researchers to study the social media site’s impact on society during the 2020 US presidential election.

The company said that the results of this study will be announced as early as the middle of next year. This research expands its Social Science One project, which involves many scholars who study the political influence of social media. Social Science One is an independent research project of Facebook, trying to carry out more academic research on social network data, balancing privacy and proprietary requirements through independent scholars, and publishing the findings to the public.

A team of 17 independent researchers from the fields of elections, democracy and social media will now work with Facebook’s internal data scientists to carry out this research.

Facebook expects that the research project will select 200,000 to 400,000 users as subjects for research, recording their browsing content on Facebook and Instagram and their behavior. This research plan will also implement targeted guidance on the experience of some participants.

Facebook employees only provide aggregated data to external researchers who conducted this study to protect the privacy of these users. Online social networking platforms have been criticized for ineffective oversight of so-called fake news and misinformation. Many people believe that this affected voters and the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook said that it will not pay these researchers or restrict them from publishing their research results, but they need to review the research results before they publish them. But Joshua Tucker, a professor of political science at New York University and one of the researchers on the project, said that although Facebook does not provide remuneration to researchers, it will pay for research.

Due to Facebook's delay in providing data, some researchers withdrew from the Social Science One project last year. The company said that the delay in providing data is to protect user privacy. (Tianmen Mountain)

Source: NetEase Technology Report, translated by Google Translate