Get the latest tech news
To know if big tech harms society requires research – which big tech manipulates
Big tech doesn’t just fund research into itself – it also controls researchers’ access to data. Even big tobacco didn’t have this kind of power.
In the mid-1950s, cigarette companies launched a coordinated campaign to manufacture doubt about the growing body of evidence which linked smoking with a number of serious health issues, such as cancer. The authors said “Meta did not have the right to prepublication approval”, but acknowledged that The Facebook Open Research and Transparency team “provided substantial support in executing the overall project”. The real problem is that social media companies not only control researchers’ access to data, but can also manipulate their systems in a way that affects the findings of the studies they fund.
Or read this on Hacker News
