The Atlantic reports that a group of researchers will get access to Instagram’s data to study how the platform affects the mental health of teens and young adults.
Now, after years of contentious relationships with academic researchers, Meta is opening a small pilot program that would allow a handful of them to access Instagram data for up to about six months in order to study the app’s effect on the well-being of teens and young adults. The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on certain research areas—investigating whether social-media use is associated with different effects in different regions of the world, for example—and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions. Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants—how many accounts they follow, for example, or how much they use Instagram and when. Meta has said that certain types of data will be off-limits, such as user-demographic information and the content of media published by users; a full list of eligible data is forthcoming, and it is as yet unclear whether internal information related to ads that are served to users or Instagram’s content-sorting algorithm, for example, might be provided. The program is being run in partnership with the Center for Open Science, or COS, a nonprofit. Researchers, not Meta, will be responsible for recruiting the teens, and will be required to get parental consent and take privacy precautions.
It’s a much-needed step forward from Meta to participate in research like this. While I’m no fan of blocking access to social media or smartphones for teens, there is no question about the effects social media can have on teens.
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