Information Ministry

Life inside Facebookistan: While Facebook still refuses to share internal data with academic researchers not in its employ, Karen Weise and Sarah Frier report for Bloomberg that in recent months the company has been quietly handing outside academics that study social media $25,000 checks with no strings attached. It’s just one of the more unusual ways the company interacts with academics, as they go on to describe. “When Facebook does provide data to researchers, it retains the right to veto or edit the paper before publication,” Weise and Frier write. “None of the professors Bloomberg spoke with knew of cases when Facebook prohibited a publication, though many said the arrangement inevitably leads academics to propose investigations less likely to be challenged.” They also note that “The company has stopped short of pursuing deeper research on potentially negative fallout of its power,” publishing more than 180 public papers about AI but very few on its impact on politics and elections.

On Twitter, Weise also notes that Facebook’s new election research initiative, which was announced with some fanfare as part of its post-Cambridge Analytica phase, is “by far its most open approach yet,” adding that “it came together under the company’s public relations and policy team, not its research group of PhDs trained in ethics and study design.”

In response to that new initiative, which readers may recall is being funded by seven major foundations and is being led by Stanford’s Nate Persily and Harvard’s Gary King, 200 members of the Association of Internet Researchers have signed an open letter arguing that it “fails to provide sufficient support for free and independent scientific research” and risks creating a “Matthew effect” (meaning that only prestigious universities will gain access to Facebook data and their prestige will generate significant legitimization and PR for Facebook in return). They add:

By being so selective about which research they actively support, the platforms exclude the critical voices to which they should be paying keen attention; they also tend to privilege US research over broader international collaboration. This creates an unacceptably imbalanced environment for social media research. Facebook’s new initiative is set up in such a way that it will select projects that address known problems in an area known to be problematic; it is unlikely to provide data access to research that addresses yet-unrecognised problems, or research that deals with issues broader than elections and politics. We therefore argue that the platform providers — and the research advisors they collaborate with — cannot be allowed to position themselves as the gatekeepers for the research that investigates how their platforms are used. Instead, we need far more transparent data access models that clearly articulate to platform users who may be accessing their data, and for what purposes.

Related: Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s longtime head of public policy and communications, who has coordinated its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and has been overseeing this new elections research commission, has announced that he is leaving the company, as Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner report for Recode. If Zuckerberg is President of Facebookistan, then Schrage has been its Minister of Information.

In Schrage’s statement on his departure, he notes, with typical understatement, “From our earliest days (remember the launch of News Feed? Photo tagging?), our innovations have been greeted with an understandable mix of enthusiasm and concern. As our community and global impact expanded, our challenge to strike a healthy balance has become more urgent and essential. I’ve enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to help meet that challenge.”

On Monday, Natasha Lamb, a managing partner at Arjuna Capital, wrote in the Financial Times that Schrage had made a sexist remark to her at the end of company’s shareholder meeting last month. Schrage apologized for the remark, as Jake Canter of Business Insider reports.

Personal footnote: In 2014, Schrage tried to delay my reporting on the unanswered questions about how its “I Voted” button may have affected the 2012 U.S. election, claiming that if I published my story it would prevent the academics inside the company researching its impact from ever publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, and offering me the inside scoop on that publication if I agreed to wait. I refused and Mother Jones ran this story, which revealed a separate experiment that Facebook researchers had run pushing hard news into more than 2 million users feed prior to the 2012 race and increasing their reported turnout. The Facebook research article, written by Jason Jones, Robert Bond et al, was eventually published in the peer-reviewed PLOS One journal, in 2017.

Also worth noting, Schrage was one of the leaders of Facebook’s ill-fated Internet.org effort to bring low-quality Internet access to developing countries, here pictured in happier days visiting the Panama Canal.

Trump watch: By digging through online job boards, Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast discovered that one of the companies profiting off of separating refugee and immigrant children from their parents is Virginia-based MVM Inc, a defense contractor with a checkered history as a security contractor in Iraq.

Bitcoin buccaneering: Stephen Bannon, former Trump White House chief strategist, is getting into the Bitcoin business, Jeremy Peters and Nathaniel Popper report for The New York Times. As they note, “His focus on creating new digital tokens, which are usually offered through initial coin offerings, puts him squarely in the edgiest, most scam-filled slice of the cryptocurrency business.” Seems about right.

Tesla workers tell Julia Carrie Wong of The Guardian that company founder Elon Musk’s stated promise to meet with every worker injured on the job at his car company is hollow. One said, “If he was truly going to meet with all the employees who got injured, he would be here for half the year.”