Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, hopes new tools released by the company will help shed light on the vast amount of knowledge about social media's impact.

Meta is releasing a new transparency product called the Meta Content Library and API, according to an announcement from the company today. The new tools will allow select researchers to access publicly available data on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to give a more overarching view of what's happening on the platforms. 

Social media companies like Meta are launching a new library to increase transparency about their recommendation algorithms and their impact on online conversations, politics, and society, amid pressure from public and regulatory pressure.

In an interview, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said the tools “are really quite important” in that they provide, in a lot of ways, “the most comprehensive access to publicly available content across Facebook and Instagram of anything that we’ve built to date.” The Content Library will also help the company meet new regulatory requirements and obligations on data sharing and transparency, as the company notes in a blog post Tuesday. 

The library and API, released in beta, provide researchers with near-real-time data on Facebook and Instagram pages, posts, groups, events, reactions, shares, comments, and post view counts, enabling efficient search and analysis at scale.

Meta plans to restrict user privacy by limiting access to data through a virtual "clean room" and requiring approved researchers to apply through an independent third-party organization.

In addition to the new library and API, Meta announced new partnerships to expand on research from 2022 on the connections between social networks and economic mobility. 

The company's announcements follow The Information's report on disbanding its Responsible AI team and distributing researchers, raising skepticism about its commitment to user safety.

Hopes for “meaningful” research

Researchers have faced issues with social media companies, including Facebook's cease-and-desist letter to New York University's Transparency Project in 2021, over data access violations.

Clegg aims for meaningful research on social media impacts, addressing the lack of consensus among researchers due to the lack of public data from social media companies.

The new library is a search engine-like database accessible through a web interface or API, allowing researchers to code queries for large data sets, like English public posts.

Meta may be pushed by EU regulators' demands for greater transparency, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates real-time data access for researchers investigating systemic risks. This trend, known as the Brussels effect, allows tech companies to comply with EU standards across multiple countries.

Meta has attempted to balance transparency demands with privacy concerns through the application process, as policy efforts have struggled to achieve this balance.

Researchers accessing Content Library and API must submit institution and research questions to University of Michigan's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research for security checks and financial interests.

Smitha Milli, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech, questions why the library's application process isn't accessible to everyone, as the library only contains publicly available data. Milli also highlights the potential time-consuming nature of the process, stating it could be "super limiting" to the research cycle.

(Meta said access to the Content Library was limited to protect user privacy: “There’s a big difference between data being publicly available on the platform versus being able to access it programmatically in a way where you can get access to a large volume of that data,” said Kiran Jagadeesh, a Meta product manager.)

Researchers seek access to information on recommendation algorithms, individual feed views, and platform experimentation methods. The latest product's progress on these aspects is uncertain, but researchers can combine the Content Library with other projects like recommendation system cards to gain a more comprehensive understanding.

Lena Frischlich, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark's Digital Democracy Centre, tested the beta version of the Content Library, finding it useful for accessing multimedia content like Instagram reels and Facebook events, and providing new data on view counts.

Frischlich argues that while the new product is a significant step towards transparency, data access remains restricted, as not every country is included in the database and only researchers at qualifying academic or non-profit institutions can access it.

Clegg believes the new tool will improve research on social media's role in society due to societal responsibility and self-interest in dispelling hyperbole and ensuring a more grounded debate, aiming to dispel the hyperbole surrounding social media and promote a more accurate understanding of its impact.

This story has been updated to clarify that non-profit research institutions and academic institutions may be granted access to the Content Library and API.