As you hold today’s hearing, we respectfully suggest you focus on the following areas: The conversation about what social media data we need should start with what questions we want to answer with those data. This measure would go a long way in securing the data we need to better study social media platforms. We are heartened by Senator Coons’ bipartisan Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, introduced last year with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Rob Portman, and drafted with assistance from one of the witnesses at this hearing, Stanford Law Professor Nate Persily. But unless researchers have access to more social media data, legislators risk operating in the dark. Over the last several years, policymakers have introduced a number of bills to regulate social media, focusing on topics ranging from antitrust to algorithms to children’s safety. That’s why we are grateful to you for holding this important hearing on platform transparency.
Instead, we’ve turned to alternative methods - surveys, experiments, browser plugins, scraping, and others - to try to glimpse from the outside what internal analysts can easily see on the inside. As a result, academic researchers are limited in our efforts to get a handle on the scale, character, and causes of the various phenomena attributed to the rise of social media. That’s because, as you know, social media companies tightly control the data necessary to study the platforms’ impact. And we’ve found that many conventional wisdoms about social media - that everyone shares fake news, or that we all live in echo chambers - aren’t actually true.īut from the beginning, we’ve been conducting our research with one hand tied behind our backs. We’ve analyzed the impact of Russian foreign interference in the 2016 elections and hate speech both in the United States and abroad. We’ve quantified how protest movements like the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, those horrified by the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in France, and groups like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and opponents of the Common Core Curriculum in the United States used social media to organize. Since starting this work more than a decade ago, we’ve made great progress in understanding the impact of social media on our society. It’s hard to overstate how critical data access and platform transparency is to our research. But it’s also helped fuel misinformation, enable harassment, and foment polarization, presenting urgent challenges to democratic governance.Īs Co-Directors of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), we lead a team of academic researchers studying how this ever-shifting online environment impacts politics, policy, and democracy. It’s made it easier than ever to find information, engage with politics, and connect with people across the globe. Over the past two decades, social media and other digital technologies have transformed our society. Thank you and the entire Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law for holding this important hearing today on “Platform Transparency: Understanding the Impact of Social Media.”
We submitted the following letter to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law ahead of its hearing on "Platform Transparency: Understanding the Impact of Social Media."ĭear Chair Coons and Ranking Member Sasse:
0 kommentar(er)
