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The
funders said in a statement that Facebook had granted the 83
scholars selected for the project access to "only a portion of
what they were told they could expect," which made it impossible
for some to carry out their research. They have given Facebook
until Sept. 30 to provide the data.
Their concerns focus on the absence of data that would show
which web pages were shared on Facebook as far back as January
2017.
The company had yet to say when the data would be made
available, the funders added.
Facebook said in a statement that it remained committed to the
project and would "continue to provide access to data and
tooling to all grant recipients - current and future."
The announcement comes only a few months after Facebook launched
the research program, which opened the company's propriety data
to independent scholars for the first time.
Data access was meant to be heavily controlled, with special
precautions to protect user privacy.
The funding consortium includes both the conservative Charles
Koch Foundation and Silicon Valley's Omidyar Network.
"We hope Facebook (not to mention other platform companies) will
find a way to provide deeply robust privacy-protected data,"
they said, as "independent scholarly analysis of social media
platforms is essential" to understanding elections and democracy
around the world.
(Reporting by Katie Paul; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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