Meta offers new tools to support research on social networks

Meta has partnered with the first-of-its-kind Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) to enable researchers to analyze data in ICPSR’s secure virtual data area. Now, they’re offering new tools that give researchers access to more publicly available content on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has expanded her research on social capital to better understand the factors that drive economic mobility around the world. The above is in addition to the four research papers published by the journals Sciences And nature It was published to better understand the influence of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the 2020 US election cycle. This was the first time that Meta, or any other technology company, had opened itself so transparently to the extensive academic research conducted by its peers about its influence during The election.

In recent months, Meta has given Beta access to its new tools: the Meta content library and application programming interface (API). After multiple rounds of feedback with researchers and other stakeholders, they are now in a position to implement these tools on a larger scale. The meta content library and API provide near real-time access to public content from Pages, posts, groups, and events on Facebook, as well as business and creator accounts on Instagram.

Details about the content, such as the number of reactions, shares, comments, and, for the first time, the number of views of the post. Researchers can search, explore, and filter this content in the graphical user interface (UI) and through the software API. Together, these tools provide the most comprehensive access to publicly available content on Facebook and Instagram of any search tool they’ve created to date.

It also helps you comply with new regulatory requirements, and your data sharing and transparency obligations. Providing these tools to researchers early in the development process gave Meta the opportunity to improve them before they were widely available.

“We will continue to make improvements as we gather more feedback from researchers. Individuals from eligible institutions working on scientific research or topics of public interest will be able to request access to these tools through partners with extensive experience in sharing secure data for research, starting with the Inter-University Consortium For Political and Social Research from the University of Michigan, Meta said in a statement.

Research on social capital

Last year, in collaboration with Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Program at Harvard University, a study was published measuring factors of economic mobility in the United States using data from 21 billion friends on Facebook; Social connections have been found to play an important role in helping communities To get out of poverty. “We are now expanding this research program to better understand the drivers of economic mobility around the world, using data from our platform on social media dynamics, as well as publicly available information about the social economy and academic institutions,” he explains. The platform seeks to study friendships between different people Socio-economic levels across the UK in collaboration with experts from the Behavioral Insights Team, the Royal Society of Arts and others.

In addition to expanding this work to more countries, “we plan to continue investigating the role that social connections play in economic opportunities, including starting a business, attending university, and getting a job. Building on our work on how people benefit from social connections, we will continue Study how social networks help communities recover from crises and assist displaced and migrant populations.