A day before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before Congress, a group of major grant makers led by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced that they had brokered a deal with the social-media giant to give independent scholars access to its user data to research the role it plays in elections.
The move comes as Facebook faces heightened scrutiny for sharing up to 87 million users’ data with Cambridge Analytica, a political-consulting firm that used the information to target users with political ads during the 2016 election.
In making the announcement, Larry Kramer, Hewlett’s president, noted the foundation’s and Facebook’s shared Silicon Valley pedigree.
“This is a critical first-step toward a deeper understanding of how social media is used to sow distrust and spread disinformation that threatens American democracy,” Kramer said in a statement. “We recognize, given our own institutional heritage, that Silicon Valley leaders with high ideals who pledge and maintain an enduring commitment to the public interest can make a profound and long-lasting contribution to society.”
In addition to Hewlett, participating donors include the Alfred P. Sloan, Charles Koch, John. S. and James. L. Knight, and Laura and John Arnold foundations; the Democracy Fund; and the Omidyar Network. The organizations declined to disclose how much money they will devote to the research.
The collaboration follows a $10 million commitment Hewlett made in late March to study digital disinformation and fake news.
The new funding will establish a research committee, members of which have yet to be named, that will set priorities for research questions. The work will be managed by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Social Science Research Council. Kramer said the arrangement will ensure the effort’s independence.
“We are not naive, and we understand the risks in working closely with a for-profit company whose business model may be threatened by the results of the research,” he said. “We believe the protections that have been put in place, with Facebook’s support, adequately ensure both the importance of the questions to be asked and the independence of the work that attempts to answer them.”
The Facebook research is part of a much wider effort by foundations to squelch fake news. Since 2016, grant makers have poured nearly $1 billion into newsrooms, universities, and think tanks that support media research and practice, according to figures compiled by the Foundation Center.
Some of the money, like the $10 million Hewlett research initiative, focuses on the use of social-media platforms to disseminate propaganda.
The Knight Foundation, with its history rooted in the Knight newspaper empire, has long been active in improving news quality. In 2016, shortly after the presidential election, Knight supplied $1.5 million in matching grants to more than 50 media organizations to combat “fake news.” Last year the foundation launched its $2.5 million Trust, Media, and Democracy project to strengthen the role of journalism in democracy and find ways to curb the proliferation of misinformation on the internet.
Knight, along with the Democracy Fund, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google, and the Markkula Foundation, also supports the Trust Project, a consortium of newsrooms that is developing “trust indicators” to help readers understand more about the organizations that deliver their news.
Other big grant makers, like the MacArthur Foundation, have focused on improving the quality of news being produced and ensuring that people in marginalized communities have a platform to tell their stories to the broader public. This year, MacArthur plans to spend $26 million on journalism grants.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that Facebook would give the data to the foundations instead of to independent scholars.
