Social Science One


Social Science One is a Facebook and Social Science Research Council research organization based administratively at Harvard University.

Organization

In 2018 Gary King, and Nathaniel Persily were co-chairs of the organization. These two presented their idea for Social Science One as a corporate and academic partnership.

Data and applications

In 2018, Social Science One described the data as being about a petabyte of data, with part being user profiles presenting the country of their location, age, brand of device they use to engage, ideological affiliation, their ratio of friends to non-friends reading their posts, and various metrics associated with the Facebook like button. The data also includes the URLs of various posts, typically 300 million per week, for a sum of 30 billion in this initial shared dataset.
Research outcomes profiled in 2019 give election insights.
Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and Omidyar Network gave Facebook deadline to share data and threatened to pull out of the project because of the delay.
On December 11, 2019, the Co-Chairs and European Advisory Committee of Social Science One made a public statement "The current situation is untenable. Heated public and political discussions are waged over the role and responsibilities of platforms in today’s societies, and yet researchers cannot make fully informed contributions to these discussions. We are mostly left in the dark, lacking appropriate data to assess potential risks and benefits. This is not an acceptable situation for scientific knowledge. It is not an acceptable situation for our societies".

Commentary

In April 2018, Social Science One provided no response to Forbes interview questions about the scope, schedule, community benefit, and safety of Social Science One data sharing project. In May 2019 the organization had still not replied but seemed to have reflect on these and questions from various commentators, as the organization still had not made data available as originally described. In August 2019 BuzzFeed noted that Social Science One had not fulfilled its commitment to share the data it promised 16 months earlier.
Vox reported that Facebook established Social Science One to prevent future events similar to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and also as a public relations response to that problem.

Investigations

Measuring the Effects of Peer Sharing on Fake and Polarized News Consumption
Nicholas Beauchamp, David Lazer, Donghee Jo, Kenneth Joseph, Lu Wang
How Hyperlink Sharing on Facebook Influences Civic Engagement and Elections in Taiwan
Pai-lin Chen, Kung Chen, Yu-Chung Cheng, Shiuh-Feng Shih
“I Read It on Facebook”: How Do Conversations on Social Media Escape the Agenda-Setting of News Media?
Jean-Philippe Cointet, Dominique Cardon, Guillaume Plique
Understanding Problematic Sharing Behavior on Facebook
Kelly Garrett, Robert Bond, Ceren Budak, Jason Jones, Drew Margolin
Patterns of Facebook Interactions around Insular and Cross-Partisan Media Sources in the Run-up of the 2018 Italian Election
Fabio Giglietto, Laura Iannelli, Giada Marino, Nicola Righetti, Luca Rossi, Augusto Valeriani
Mapping Disinformation Campaigns across Platforms: The German General Election
Simon Hegelich, Joana Bayraktar, Fabienne Marco, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Juan Medina Serrano, Morteza Shahrezaye
The Role of Facebook in Legislative Campaigns in Chile
Juan Luna, Cristian Pérez-Muñoz, Barbara Poblete, Fernando Rosenblatt, Sergio Toro, Sebastián Valenzuela
Characterizing Mainstream and Nonmainstream Online News Sources in Social Media
Tanushree Mitra, Momen Bhuiyan, Shruti Phadke, Prerna Juneja
The Demographics of the Sharing of Hyperpartisan News in Brazil
Pablo Ortellado, Márcio Ribeiro
SHARENEWS: Predicting the Shareworthiness of ‘Real’ and ‘Fake’ News in Europe
Damian Trilling, Wouter Atteveldt, Denis Halagiera, Jakub Jakubowski, Juhi Kulshrestha, Judith Moeller, Cornelius Puschmann, Agnieszka Stępińska, Sebastian Stier, Cristian Vaccari, Claes Vreese
Studying Polarization, Misinformation, and Manipulation across Multiple Platforms and the Larger Information Ecosystem
Joshua Tucker, Richard Bonneau, Cody Buntain, Andrew Guess, Jonathan Nagler, Megan Brown
False News on Facebook during the 2017 Chilean Elections: Analyzing Its Content, Diffusion, and Audience Characteristics
Sebastián Valenzuela, Magdalena Saldaña, Benjamín Bustos, Juan Luna, Jorge Pérez, Bárbara Poblete
Do Fact-Checks Slow the Spread of Misinformation on Facebook and Twitter?
Matthew Baum, Nicholas Beauchamp, Nic Dias, Nir Grinberg, Cameron Hickey, David Lazer, Briony Swire-Thompson
Platforms, Ideology, and Demographics: Sources and Impact of Polarization on Propagation of Disinformation and False News
Yochai Benkler, Edoardo Airoldi, Justin Clark, Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, Jonas Kaiser, Aaron Kaufman
Momin Malik, Hal Roberts
How Does Facebook Influence Parliament?
John Bryden, Lewis Westbury
Investigating Digital Outrage as an Engine of Disinformation
Molly Crockett, William Brady, Guillaume Chaslot, Kate Klonick, Killian McLoughlin
Exploring the Dissemination of Misinformation on Facebook in the United States
Andrew Guess, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker
Facebook Information Diffusion and Protest Mobilization: State-Level Analyses of the 2018 March for Our Lives Demonstrations

K. Hazel Kwon, Shawn Walker
Breaking Echo Chambers: How News Diffuses across Polarized Groups on Facebook
Massimo Maoret, Jordi Torrents, Maria Trupia
Social Media and Elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe
Admire Mare
Framing and Sharing News on Social Media
Sora Park, Caroline Fisher, Glen Fuller, Michael Jensen, Jee Lee, Yoonmo Sang
Identifying Best Practices to Correct Misinformation on Facebook
Ethan Porter, David Broniatowski, Pedram Hosseini, Thomas Wood
Studying User Behavior in Reaction to Mis/Disinformation on Facebook
Franziska Roesner
Looking beyond the Crisis of Democracy: Patterns of Representation in Israeli Elections
Tamir Sheafer, Shaul Shenhav, Dror Markus, Guy Mor, Alon Zoizner
Scoping the “Fake News” Problem: What Fraction of Americans’ Information Diet Is Fake News, or Even News at All?
Duncan Watts, Hunt Allcott, David Rothschild
The Social Media Behavior of Venezuelan State Media: A Case Study on TeleSUR English
José Ricardo Zapata, Luciano Gallon, Ana Miralles, Ariel Sheen