Why Internet Scholars Are Calling Out Facebook for Restricting Access to Its Data

After news broke in March that a scholar had harvested data about millions of Facebook users and shared it with Cambridge Analytica, a political-consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign, the social-media company made some changes.

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Facebook announced plans to restrict outsiders’ access to user information. It also said that a select group of scholars would be granted unprecedented access to its data in a project that will be partly overseen by the Social Science Research Council.

The scholars will not be able to publish that information, but they will learn what the company will and won’t share with outside researchers and, presumably, why. They will then serve as a filter, meting out the data to researchers whose projects will seek to answer one question: How have social media influenced democracy?

Those announcements may sound like welcome changes to social-media users worried about their privacy. User data will be less accessible to outside companies and researchers who may have nefarious intentions, but trustworthy scholars will still be able to tap into the endless trove of information.

That’s the theory, at least. But some scholars of the internet say the new restrictions are actually a problem.

A group of those scholars last month published an open letter sounding the alarm. They also created a document listing research papers that would not exist, they say, under the new restrictions Facebook has imposed on the use of its data.

The Chronicle recently spoke to the author of the letter, Axel Bruns, a professor of communication and media studies at the Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. Bruns is also president of the Association of Internet Researchers. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What, in your view, is the problem with Facebook’s changes?

A. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the revelations about how data might have been misused, Facebook has closed down or reduced a lot of the capabilities of the API [application programming interface, the tool that allows researchers seeking data to interact directly with Facebook’s servers]. It reduces the capabilities for commercial users and researchers to do work on Facebook.

To give you an example, what’s being restricted is some of the ability to gauge the circulation of particular URLs on Facebook. They’ve restricted the ability to track URLs to see how far they’ve been disseminated. That makes it a lot more difficult to assess the spread of information.

Facebook also announced a collaboration with the Social Science Research Council and a group of foundations based mainly in the United States. The initiative is framed around elections and democracy. It seems that they are putting in place a panel of experts constituted in some way that’s not entirely transparent. That panel will define the research agenda for this initiative. That panel of experts will design this agenda and then call for submissions for research projects that will be assessed for potential funding.

In a sense that’s very welcome. At the same time, if it’s only elections and democracy, that shrinks the breadth of the research being done.

All of this positions Facebook as even more of an information broker, even more of a gatekeeper. That’s something we find very problematic because a lot of the issues that researchers tend to recognize may not be recognized as issues by Facebook.

Q. What are you and other internet researchers doing to push back?

A. When the first reports came out about these changes to the API and the Social Science Research Council thing later, quite a few of us were concerned by what that would mean for Facebook research.

Anja Bechmann, a colleague at Aarhus University, in Denmark, set up an open Google Doc. It lists research that had been done that would no longer be possible with the changes to the API. We followed up by writing this open letter that was really outlining this issue.

We gradually invited a number of researchers from around the world to sign. Something like five past, present, and future presidents of the Association of Internet Researchers participated, with a very significant group of senior leaders in our community. That ended up being those first 27 or so signatories. We’ve had 250 additional signatories.

Q. What type of research is listed in the Google Doc?

A. It’s a real mix. It spreads out from the obvious things around news, journalism, and politics — people doing large-scale studies of particular elections, how news and information spreads across the network — then all the way through to things like health research — trying to pick up identifiers of unhealthy behavior, self-harm, excessive use of alcohol, depression.

There’s computer-science work that’s less interested in the content and more in the patterns of activity: How do people use social media? How do they interact on social media? Do they naturally form cliques of interactions that are disconnected from the rest of the network, or to what extent are they permeable from the rest of the network? What are people who aren’t scholars or journalists actually doing with social media? Is it for socializing? How does it influence social relationships?

Q. Referring to the new restrictions Facebook announced, your open letter says, “These changes are as much about strengthening Facebook’s business model of data control as they are about actually improving data privacy for users.” What do you mean by that?

A. They talk about a lot of the changes as strengthening privacy. That’s obviously welcome if that’s really the motivation. At the same time, they’re not going to shut out the commercial partners that they’ve got. Large market-research companies are still able to pay for the data. That intermediate market of companies and researchers who have arisen around midscale use of Facebook data — that’s going to be reduced and shut out. Ultimately it means that in order to do any larger-scale work with Facebook, you have to partner with Facebook itself.

It’s able to really lock out any larger-scale research that is addressing issues that Facebook might not want to address. It can pick friendly researchers. It can pick commercial entities that might do the right type of work. It enables Facebook to really control that choice much more.

Q. What, in your view, is a better way to protect users’ privacy but also give researchers access to data?

A. Facebook and other platforms have provided, undifferentiated, the API to people who want to get access to Facebook data. There’s no difference between access for research purposes and for other purposes.

If you have a researcher coming in who has ethical clearance from a national review board or their institution, their research has been reviewed for ethical implications. Restrictions are in place for how they will handle the data. If you’re doing research for the public interest and intend to be independent from Facebook, then that’s a different case than a developer coming in to build a platform that connects with Facebook data. Scholarly research needs to be treated differently from other commercial uses.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.