Let me second the request(s) for information about experiences with recent requests for Facebook data access as well as Social Science One. I will be in Menlo Park visiting Facebook Monday for a meeting. If you have useful questions or experiences to share, it might help advance the discussion. Most of what we know in detail is about being #lockedout of "Premium" and historical Twitter. We have hit a major wall trying to offer academic and technical support in the identification of problematic and threatening multilingual content, despite significant discussions in 2018 with Facebook personnel on the topic. Who on the AoIR list has stories of being #allowedin to study Facebook data or to work with them improve the way FB meets its most significant challenges? One hunch I have (with sparse evidence) is that the only way to be allowed back in now (apart from SS1) is on the back of collaboration with a non-profit or commercial customer (not a software vendor); that is, as an academic or a team attached to a non-profit or corporation that spends money on Facebook. This is not how we have operated, but it appears some analytics firms do get to the data this way, via their customer, and we are exploring it now with Apple, Adobe, and some others with actual power with respect to the platforms. There is a double edge, always, when you go to the powerful to ask for help. Nonetheless, it may be that to study Facebook going forward, academics need to rethink their idea of private partnerships, funding sources, and how to frame a study that Facebook can enthusiastically support. The same was true when we were originally going to the NSF or NIH for funding digital government or digital health research twenty years ago (yes, all this work in my life began in Small Grant for Exploratory Research, SGER, back in the fall of 1999). Gatekeepers exist (public and private) and they have a map that shows where access and choke points are. I would say the map has changed as have the gatekeepers, but most of us are in the dark even if we once thought we were preternaturally inside the machine itself. There is a serious information disparity in play about the research landscape and it is worthwhile to keep reminding those on the inside (with current access to data) they are better off with more rather than fewer legitimate studies. I am speculating, but 2019 is probably the last year I am going to try and crack this nut, which is very tough indeed. It was a decade ago we linked up to the Open Graph API because Mark Z told us the information needed to be free. Definitely there are/were issues that complete openness with inadequate IRB policies in place have generated. Perhaps if leadership in the association of IRBs (is there one?) sent a senior delegation to Facebook, some ground rules could be set by a broader group than the gatekeepers at Social Science One. Finally, looking back, Dr. Charli Carpenter & I saw a lot of this coming in 2010 when we created "MarkZism: Tyranny or Transcendence?" though (mea culpa) we definitely misunderstood Julian Assange at the time. Our animated debate is here: https://youtu.be/PEQQ9r0aC34 ~Stu On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 3:04 PM Alexandre Leroux <alleroux@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Dear colleges,
I'm looking for feedback from researchers working on Facebook who tried/passed App Review process. How did it went? Was it successful? Did you fill it stating your research purpose or a more generic aim?
My feeling is that FB might be hostile to academic research on its ground but maybe some of you experienced the opposite?
Our current project requires downloading a large amount of post and comment from Pages and our API access is locked down since last December and we have yet to submit the review.
Thanks in advance,
Alex
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Leroux Alexandre Ph.D candidate Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality Université Libre de Bruxelles
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