Facebook Didn't Give Researchers the Data It Promised
It only provided information about half of its users in the U.S. rather than all of them.
By - Farhan Mazid
Facebook reportedly withheld a significant amount of information about the ways people use its platform from researchers examining the spread of misinformation on the social network because of a technical error that went unnoticed for the two years the program was active.
The New York Times reported that researchers expected to receive—and were told they had been provided—all of the data Facebook had relating to user interaction in the U.S. But they were only given access to information related to half of the social network's American users.
The report said Facebook only provided information about U.S. users "who engaged with political pages enough to make their political leanings clear." But the company also claimed that data about its users outside the U.S. "did not appear to be inaccurate," as the NYT put it.
Facebook reportedly said in an email that it was working to gather the rest of the data, but it wouldn't be ready for several weeks because of the sheer amount of information involved. It also said it "would like to offer as much support as possible" to affected researchers.
The NYT said the missing information was discovered by University of Urbino researcher Fabio Giglietto after he compared the data available in the company's recently published report about the top posts on its platform to the info that had previously been available only to researchers.
Now those academics looking into the spread of misinformation on Facebook will have to wait several weeks (at least) to receive accurate data sets. The new information will require them to update existing publications and account for the lack of available data in their current studies.
The NYT said that researchers told the company in a call that they were losing months of work because of this error, that doctoral degrees were on the line, and that they feared Facebook was "either negligent or, worse, actively undermining the research" because of this error.