Michael Wagner, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was asked to observe the work and wrote a commentary accompanying the Science papers , says Meta’s business interests may have influenced the project at some points. For instance, he says Meta researchers believed that the experimental studies changing users’ feeds were unlikely to show any big effects—and they pushed to get these papers done first. “You could read it as ‘the big splash is going to be that there aren’t huge effects that are so deleterious to democracy that we need to have a bunch of new regulations on our platform.’”
Office of Strategic Communication