乔·阿尼

In 布莱恩·C. 基冈的告诉, the loss of tools like CrowdTangle and Pushshift—which allow 研究ers to study user behavior and how information is shared on social media—is like particle physicists one day waking up to find out they can no longer access the Large Hadron Collider.

“I have grad students interested in how online extremism works, the consequences of political polarization, whether content moderation is actually effective at stopping hate speech,基冈说, 助理教授 信息科学 at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the 博彩平台推荐. “To be able to understand questions like these requires access to data from these platforms—and restricting it imperils our ability to be impactful in our work.”

本月初, Meta announced it was shutting down CrowdTangle, one of the most effective tools for understanding how 脸谱网 and Instagram’s algorithms work and how disinformation is created and spread on the company’s platforms.

这对研究人员来说是一个打击, watchdogs and journalists who will be less able to track how disinformation, hate speech and other poisons pollute the social media atmosphere—but in the context of business decisions, there are strong financial and reputational benefits to obfuscating its operations. Not only is the platform sitting on mountains of data that can be licensed to 公司 building models to train generative artificial intelligence, 基冈说, “it’s easy to imagine a world where Meta doesn’t want its name attached to a paper about how neo-Nazis are using 脸谱网 groups to organize themselves.”

“洗隐私”的经济案例

这正成为一个越来越普遍的故事, as platforms that once made their data public are increasingly erecting paywalls, 阻止api或与A达成交易.I. 公司. 经常, those platforms mask their motivations behind what 基冈 calls “privacy washing,” citing concerns about safeguarding user data in justifying the removal of key features for 研究 labs, 新闻编辑室和公众.

This particular example comes at an inauspicious time, with digital disinformation ratcheting up ahead of Election Day and more Americans than ever getting their news from social media.

“To address the challenges we’re up against, 这些都是实时发生的, that we see journalists trying to grapple with, requires different models of publicly engaged scholarship, beyond just academic papers that take a year or two to publish,基冈说. “The loss of these data tools imperils our ability to do that kind of scholarship and is ultimately a detriment to democracy and civic institutions.”

It’s not just the media or public at large that are affected. When these tools are taken offline, it hurts the quality of the online communities, as well. 基冈 has volunteered as a moderator on Reddit, and said PushShift—which Reddit limited access to beginning last summer—was vital to forming context about user behavior that could determine whether someone was having a bad day, or whether that person was truly a bad actor.

课堂的影响

这对主持人来说是个挑战, but it’s having a bigger impact on his professional life, 既是研究者也是老师. 他可以使用2016年美国奥运会的案例研究.S. presidential election cycle to show how fake news circulated, and the role of actors like Cambridge Analytica, “but that data and those strategies are now eight years old, and those contexts no longer exist—we’re in a different world now,基冈说. “Can we prepare our students to be better engineers, 经理, artists and citizens with such old case studies?”

Meta于2016年收购了Crowdtangle, and 基冈 acknowledged that the tech platform isn’t required to make its data publicly available. “但研究人员已经建立了博彩平台推荐的职业生涯, infrastructure and programs on assumptions that we’d have access to these tools, so to have that rug pulled from under us has been profoundly disruptive to our ability to provide transparency, 参与并提出关键问题,他说.

基冈 hopes to learn more through a grant he’s pursuing from the National Science Foundation. 如果授予, he hopes to study the consequences of actions like Meta’s in the scientific 研究 community.

“When that data disappears, how does that impact scholarship?他问. “Can we measure how 研究 methods changing, 博彩平台推荐合作的方式, the strategies we’ll need to develop to make sure we’re able to ask critical questions?”