The Italian researcher Fabio Giglietto found that i data provided by Facebook to researchers regarding fake news on the platform are incomplete. In fact, they only include about half of the users in the United States, while Facebook had promised the full data to the researchers Social Science One.
Facebook: Incomplete information given to fake news researchers
Over the past two years, the Social Science One research group has used data provided by Facebook to develop models on the spread of fake news. In fact, The New York Times reported that some according to some internal emails the data cor that’s about half of what Facebook promised.
The first to sound the alarm bell was Fabio Giglietto, researcher ofUniversity of Urbino. Who compared the sample provided by Facebook to the researchers with those on the most successful posts on the platform. This discovery comes after that Facebook has banned some researchers. Guilty only of using a legal plugin while looking for data that linked Facebook ads to fake news.
Cody Buntain, a researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, comments: “We raised a lot of doubts about whether we could trust the data Facebook provided to Social Science One. We now know that we shouldn’t have trusted so much. And we should have requested more attention in validating the data ”.
Researchers complain that months of research have been lost due to the wrong data. Even putting your own experimental degree at risk. At least one of them told the New York Times that they believe Facebook voluntarily provided incomplete data.
Facebook “apologized for the inconvenience that it may have caused and would like to provide as much support as possible ”. The company has assured that it is hard at work updating the data. But given the sheer amount of information, it could take weeks for the review to be complete. Weeks in which researchers will not be able to study fake news on the platform.