![\"Supporters](\"\/\/media.nature.com\/w800\/magazine-assets\/d41586-019-01447-5\/d41586-019-01447-5_16698466.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>Supporters of presidential candidate Sebastian Pi\u00f1era wave flags at a gathering during Chile’s 2017 presidential election.<\/span>Credit: Sebasti\u00e1n Vivallo O\u00f1ate\/Agencia Makro\/Getty<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Facebook is giving social scientists unprecedented access to its data so that they can investigate how social media platforms\u00a0influence elections<\/a>and alter democracies.<\/p>\n More than 60 researchers split into 12 teams will tackle questions such as how fake news spreads, who distributes it and how to identify it. Their projects, announced on 28 April, will focus on countries including Germany, Chile, Italy and the United States.<\/p>\n The scientists will have access to reams of Facebook data such as the URLs that users have shared and demographic information including gender and approximate age. The company \u2014 which has been\u00a0accused of privacy violations in the past<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is developing new protections aimed at shielding the identities of its users.<\/p>\n The research teams were chosen by the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn, New York, a non-profit research group, and Social Science One, an academic-industry partnership with ties to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A coalition of eight charitable organizations will fund the work. Facebook had no say in selecting the projects.<\/p>\n The programme could set a precedent for how social scientists work with companies to access information about social media, a growing force in shaping public discourse, says Simon Hegelich, a political data scientist at the Technical University of Munich. \u201cIt\u2019s still a problem that social media is so important \u2014 especially for social science \u2014 but we don\u2019t have access to the data,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes you spend a lot of time trying to find things out that were already known in companies.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Worldwide webs<\/strong><\/p>\n Hegelich leads a team that will study the spread of false information in Germany\u2019s 2017 general election using data from Facebook and Twitter. The researchers already have a list of Twitter accounts implicated in spreading misinformation during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. They found that some of those accounts were also active in Germany, and linked them to Facebook accounts with similar user names and content.<\/p>\n The team will be able to access Facebook\u2019s data on URLs that were shared more than 100 times on the site to determine the scope of the false information campaign in Germany. Hegelich and his colleagues will try to determine how many people shared links promoted by these accounts \u2014 as well as the users’ gender and approximate age. The researchers hope to use their findings to identify other such misinformation efforts, if they exist.<\/p>\n The opportunity to combine data across social-media services is particularly welcome, says Hegelich. Social scientists tend to analyse information from one platform at a time, he says, but that doesn\u2019t reflect how data flows in the real world. \u201cYou have information taken out of Twitter and then shared again on Facebook,\u201d Hegelich says.<\/p>\n The depth of access the project teams will have to Facebook data goes beyond many previous studies where researchers were restricted to more limited data sets, says Michael Veale, who studies technology policy at the Alan Turing Institute in London. And that raises questions about the conclusions in those studies, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s really good that Facebook \u2014 and hopefully some other companies \u2014 are saying that we are aware that we need to give researchers access to proper data sets within secure environments.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Facebook won\u2019t have a say in approving or blocking the publication of the projects’ work \u2014 so even results which cast the company in a negative light will be shared, says Sebasti\u00e1n Valenzuela, who studies communication at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago.<\/p>\n He is co-leading a project on the spread of fake news on Facebook during Chile\u2019s 2017 general election. The team hopes to quantify which demographic groups of Chileans were most likely to be exposed to fake news.<\/p>\n The project will be the first of its kind to concentrate on Chile, says Valenzuela. \u201cThe evidence we have is mostly focused on the United States,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m not so sure it\u2019s going to be applicable to countries in Latin America.\u201d<\/p>\n Veale is happy to see projects from around the world \u2014 but he is disappointed that none of the studies focus on India, the country with the largest Facebook user base.<\/p>\n Geographic specificity may be particularly important as policymakers grapple with how to handle disinformation campaigns, Valenzuela adds. \u201cIf we don\u2019t understand the fake news problem, the solutions we\u2019re developing might not be the right ones,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (\uc6d0\ubb38: \uc5ec\uae30<\/a>\ub97c \ud074\ub9ad\ud558\uc138\uc694~)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zeroing in<\/h5>\n