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by crystalmeph 2118 days ago
> Facebook says it will select scientific samples of Americans to participate in the study that will reflect the diversity of the nation’s adult population as well as Facebook and Instagram’s users. [0]

The timing on this seems really suspect. Will they release any sort of information on the breakdown of people that were offered / accepted a spot in this study, particularly their political leanings?

It’s pretty well accepted that the workforce in Silicon Valley leans a particular way politically. The suspicion will be that Facebook is encouraging those who lean the other way to mute themselves.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/09/04/facebook-users-will-be-paid-to...
2 comments
TylerE 2118 days ago
The group running this is extremely reputable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORC_at_the_University_of_Chic...

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coeneedell 2118 days ago
I'm a UChicago student studying computational social science. I have a couple friends working at the NORC and I can say that, as someone who spends every day reading and criticizing studies done over the internet or with machine learning, the NORC always amazes me with their quality. Every time I get frustrated with some vaguely racist/dehumanizing social science paper I go read whatever is on NORC's home page to calm down.
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henriquez 2118 days ago
Why not just wait two months though? The timing makes it impossible to not be suspicious, after all “this is the most important election in the history of our nation.”
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TylerE 2118 days ago
Because clearly the point of the study is to look for some sort of correlation between social media engagement and voting activity.

The timing is a feature, not a bug.

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purple-again 2118 days ago
There is zero attempt to be coy here. Scroll down to the bottom section where they explicitly reference the election.
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giancarlostoro 2118 days ago
Whats worse is it could come off as paying specific users to stay silent during the elections and paying other users to stay in the dark from other things (some people treat Facebook as an actual newsfeed). Its definitely suspect. I think anytime a company does things like this or tries to arbitrate what truth is they should be considered a publisher and not a platform.
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