44 ms·

Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

327 points by bikenaga 9mo ago

bikenaga 9mo ago
Original article: "Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507 Abstract: "To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to industry in the form of prior funding, collaboration, or employment. However, the majority of these ties go undisclosed in the published research. These trends do not arise from broad scientific engagement with industry, but rather from a select group of scientists who maintain long-lasting relationships with industry. Undisclosed ties to industry are common not just among authors, but among reviewers and academic editors during manuscript evaluation. Further, industry-tied research garners more attention within the academy, among policymakers, on social media, and in the news. Finally, we find evidence that industry ties are associated with a topical focus away from impacts of platform-scale features. Together, these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque. Going forward there is a need to strengthen disclosure norms and implement policies to ensure the visibility of independent research, and the integrity of industry supported research. "
shevy-java 9mo ago
A system built to yield to perfect lobbyism.
austin-cheney 9mo ago
I bet the same is true with AI and bitcoin social media posts and research.
- fenwick67 9mo ago
  And cigarettes and fossil fuels
fnoef 9mo ago
Would it be appropriate to use :surprised_pikachu_face:? I meant, I no longer know who to trust. It feels like the only solution is to go live in a forest, and disconnect from everything.
- greggoB 9mo ago
  This has been my default expected reaction since Nov 2024. So I'd say so. Also feel you wrt living in a forest and leaving this all behind.
- username223 9mo ago
  > It feels like the only solution is to go live in a forest, and disconnect from everything. As much as I approve of living in forests, you don't need to go that far. Tech bros are fond of things being "frictionless," so add some friction. Delete the social media apps from your phone and use their websites instead. Don't bookmark the sites, but make yourself type in the URLs each time you want to visit. If each visit is intentional, instead of something you do automatically when you're bored, you'll have a better experience.
- intended 9mo ago
  There is a coalition for independent tech research that was formed, because researchers saw exactly this problem. https://independenttechresearch.org/about-us/ https://independenttechresearch.org/about-us/
AlexandrB 9mo ago
Same as it ever was. You see the same kind of thing is the food industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, etc. On the one hand it's almost inevitable. Who (outside of the government) is going to care enough about the results of stuff like this to fund it if not the industry affected? You also often need the industry's help if you're doing anything that involves large sample sizes or some kind of mass production. On the other hand it puts a big fat question mark over any policy-affecting findings since there's an incentive not to piss off the donors/helpers.
- imiric 9mo ago
  The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.
  - windowpains 9mo ago
    You say “a CEO” like it’s just a fungible human unit. In reality, a CEO is much much more valuable than a median human. Think of how many shareholders are impacted, many little old grey haired grannies, dependent on their investments for food, shelter and medical expenses. When you think of the fuller context, surely you see how sociopathic it is to shrug at the killing of a CEO, let alone a CEO of a major corporation. Or maybe sociopathy is the norm these days, for the heavily online guys.
    - asdff 9mo ago
      The CEO literally is a fungible human unit. Any job can be learned.
      - terminalshort 9mo ago
        In that case it also accomplishes nothing to kill him because another will just take his place. So either way you lose.
Grimblewald 9mo ago
From history we know that research left unchecked and unrestricted can start leading to some really dark and horrible things. Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like on the entire population. I never understood why this doesn't alarm more people on a deep level. Heck you wouldn't get ethics approval for animal studies on half of what we know social media companies do, and for good reason. Why do we allow this?
- terminalshort 9mo ago
  What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval? Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do on animals. That claim sounds ridiculous.
  - shimman 9mo ago
    Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts? Why are these types of comments so common on this site? No obviously we aren't in fact talking about making basic code changes, but maybe if those changes are being consistently done that clearly show users getting more depressed or alienated it should be questioned more and finally regulated. Fun fact, the last data privacy law the US passed was about video stores not sharing your rentals. Maybe it's time we start passing more, after all it's not like these companies HAVE to conduct business this way. It's all completely arbitrary, there's no reason why social media companies can't be legally compelled to divest from all user PII and be forced to go to regulated third party companies for such information. Or force social media companies to allow export of data or forcing them to follow consistent standards so competitors can easily enter the realm and users can easily follow too. You can go for the throat and say that social media companies can't own an advertising platform either. Before you go all "oh no the government should help the business magnates more, not the users." I suggest you study how monopolies existed in the 19th century because they look no different than the corporate structure of any big tech company, and see how government finally regulated those bloodsuckers back then.
BurningFrog 9mo ago
Keep in mind that those qualified to do research in a field typically has worked in that industry. Because that's where people with that expertise work.
- duskwuff 9mo ago
  And, in many cases, because that's where funding exists. This comes up somewhat frequently in discussions of pet food. Most of the companies doing research into pet food - e.g. doing feeding studies, nutritional analysis, etc - are the manufacturers of those foods. This isn't because there's some dark conspiracy of pet food companies to suppress independent research; it's simply because no one else is funding research in the field.
cheriot 9mo ago
We need an update of Thank You for Smoking
- simplisticelk 9mo ago
  You should give it a rewatch keeping in mind that it was financed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The message of the film comes across a bit differently in that light; much more libertarian/anti-government. Enjoyable film nonetheless!
- blitzar 9mo ago
  More doctors smoke facebook than any other social media
Jadiiee 9mo ago
My jaw stayed in place
BrenBarn 9mo ago
But what undisclosed ties might this study itself have?
princevegeta89 9mo ago
No surprise. Social media is a shithole.
schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
Experts say
h4kunamata 9mo ago
Since when is this news?? Whole industries are paid for decades, the hope are the independent journalists with no ties to anybody but the public they wanna reach. Find one independent journalist on YT with lots of information and sources for them, and you will noticed how we have been living in a lie.
hsuduebc2 9mo ago
This is ridiculously recurring pattern.
hsuduebc2 9mo ago
I’m half expecting headlines thirty years from now to talk about social media the way we now talk about leaded gasoline, a slow, population-wide exposure that messed with people’s minds and quietly dragged down cognition, wellbeing, and even the economy across whole generations.
everdrive 9mo ago
Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing today: extreme ideas, populism, the destruction of institutions. All of this because people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up.
- decipherer 9mo ago
  We have exited the age of information, and entered the age of irritation.
  - HPsquared 9mo ago
    "Rage bait" is 2025 Oxford Word of the Year. We are reaching saturation levels now, I think, where people are becoming aware of it. https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/ https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
      I'm glad people are aware of it. 7 years I heard about The Scissor on SSC and wasn't sure if people would ever believe it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      Exposure is a good first step. But what action is taken with that awareness? We seem to be in that post truth era where being told what's happening before your eyes is at best met with apathy and at worst rejected.
- gjsman-1000 9mo ago
  > the destruction of institutions More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings? The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change. Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
chaps 9mo ago
Surprised it's not more, but it makes sense when you consider the sources of the data. Gotta have data sharing agreements, yeah?
dzink 9mo ago
How do you do objective research without a data pipeline? Social media companies can use user privacy as an excuse to not share feeds that influence users. The first step to fixing the wrongs is transparency, but there are no incentives for big tech to enable that.
potato3732842 9mo ago
Literally every industry is like this. Academia is basically a reputation laundering industry. If the cigarette people said smokes good or the oil people you'd never believe them. But they and their competitors fund labs at universities, and sure those universities may publish stuff they don't like from time to time, but overall things are gonna trend toward "not harmful to benefactors". And then what gets published gets used as the basis for decisions on how to direct your tax dollars, deploy state violence for or against certain things, etc, etc. And of course (some of) the academics want to do research that drives humanity forward or whatever, but they're basically stuck selling their labor to (after several layers in between) the donors for decades in order to eek out a little bit of what they want. It's not just "how the sausage is made" that's the problem. It's who you're sourcing the ingredients for, who you're paying off for the permit to run the factory, who's supplying you labor. You can't fix this with minor process adjustments.
devradardev 9mo ago
This is a clever approach to reduce token usage. In my experience with Gemini 3 for code analysis, the biggest bottleneck isn't just the logic, but the verbosity of standard languages consuming the context window. A targeted intermediate language like this could make 'thinking' models much more efficient for complex tasks.
- irishcoffee 9mo ago
  Almost like… a simplified set of instructions you would give a computer that get distilled down into machine code that executes on bare metal!
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Braxton1980 9mo ago
This means their research should be examined in more detail but unless their evidence they are being dishonest in some sense it doesn't invalidate their findings
deepriverfish 9mo ago
I'm surprised it's this low with how shady the social media industry is.
blackqueeriroh 9mo ago
Lol, should check out the reality of obesity science
wotsdat 9mo ago
[dead]
jbullock35 9mo ago
From the article: > A new preprint reports that in nearly one third of studies on social media appearing in major interdisciplinary journals, the authors have ties to industry that should be disclosed but aren’t. Some received funding from a social media company; others previously co-authored work with industry employees. Note that last part. It makes this effort seem silly: there's no conflict of interest just because one of your past co-authors at one time worked for someone in the industry.
HardwareLust 9mo ago
Only a third? That's better than I imagined, assuming that figure is accurate.
insane_dreamer 9mo ago
Considering that published findings are fairly damning when it comes to the impact of social media on society (and especially teenagers), the conclusion I draw from this is that the situation may be even worse than we think.

327 points by bikenaga 9mo ago

Original article: "Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507 Abstract: "To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to industry in the form of prior funding, collaboration, or employment. However, the majority of these ties go undisclosed in the published research. These trends do not arise from broad scientific engagement with industry, but rather from a select group of scientists who maintain long-lasting relationships with industry. Undisclosed ties to industry are common not just among authors, but among reviewers and academic editors during manuscript evaluation. Further, industry-tied research garners more attention within the academy, among policymakers, on social media, and in the news. Finally, we find evidence that industry ties are associated with a topical focus away from impacts of platform-scale features. Together, these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque. Going forward there is a need to strengthen disclosure norms and implement policies to ensure the visibility of independent research, and the integrity of industry supported research. "

shevy-java 9mo ago

A system built to yield to perfect lobbyism.

austin-cheney 9mo ago

I bet the same is true with AI and bitcoin social media posts and research.

fenwick67 9mo ago
And cigarettes and fossil fuels

fnoef 9mo ago

Would it be appropriate to use :surprised_pikachu_face:? I meant, I no longer know who to trust. It feels like the only solution is to go live in a forest, and disconnect from everything.

greggoB 9mo ago
This has been my default expected reaction since Nov 2024. So I'd say so. Also feel you wrt living in a forest and leaving this all behind.
username223 9mo ago
> It feels like the only solution is to go live in a forest, and disconnect from everything. As much as I approve of living in forests, you don't need to go that far. Tech bros are fond of things being "frictionless," so add some friction. Delete the social media apps from your phone and use their websites instead. Don't bookmark the sites, but make yourself type in the URLs each time you want to visit. If each visit is intentional, instead of something you do automatically when you're bored, you'll have a better experience.
intended 9mo ago
There is a coalition for independent tech research that was formed, because researchers saw exactly this problem. https://independenttechresearch.org/about-us/ https://independenttechresearch.org/about-us/

AlexandrB 9mo ago

Same as it ever was. You see the same kind of thing is the food industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, etc. On the one hand it's almost inevitable. Who (outside of the government) is going to care enough about the results of stuff like this to fund it if not the industry affected? You also often need the industry's help if you're doing anything that involves large sample sizes or some kind of mass production. On the other hand it puts a big fat question mark over any policy-affecting findings since there's an incentive not to piss off the donors/helpers.

imiric 9mo ago
The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.
- windowpains 9mo ago
  You say “a CEO” like it’s just a fungible human unit. In reality, a CEO is much much more valuable than a median human. Think of how many shareholders are impacted, many little old grey haired grannies, dependent on their investments for food, shelter and medical expenses. When you think of the fuller context, surely you see how sociopathic it is to shrug at the killing of a CEO, let alone a CEO of a major corporation. Or maybe sociopathy is the norm these days, for the heavily online guys.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    The CEO literally is a fungible human unit. Any job can be learned.
    - terminalshort 9mo ago
      In that case it also accomplishes nothing to kill him because another will just take his place. So either way you lose.

Grimblewald 9mo ago

From history we know that research left unchecked and unrestricted can start leading to some really dark and horrible things. Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like on the entire population. I never understood why this doesn't alarm more people on a deep level. Heck you wouldn't get ethics approval for animal studies on half of what we know social media companies do, and for good reason. Why do we allow this?

terminalshort 9mo ago
What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval? Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do on animals. That claim sounds ridiculous.
- shimman 9mo ago
  Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts? Why are these types of comments so common on this site? No obviously we aren't in fact talking about making basic code changes, but maybe if those changes are being consistently done that clearly show users getting more depressed or alienated it should be questioned more and finally regulated. Fun fact, the last data privacy law the US passed was about video stores not sharing your rentals. Maybe it's time we start passing more, after all it's not like these companies HAVE to conduct business this way. It's all completely arbitrary, there's no reason why social media companies can't be legally compelled to divest from all user PII and be forced to go to regulated third party companies for such information. Or force social media companies to allow export of data or forcing them to follow consistent standards so competitors can easily enter the realm and users can easily follow too. You can go for the throat and say that social media companies can't own an advertising platform either. Before you go all "oh no the government should help the business magnates more, not the users." I suggest you study how monopolies existed in the 19th century because they look no different than the corporate structure of any big tech company, and see how government finally regulated those bloodsuckers back then.

BurningFrog 9mo ago

Keep in mind that those qualified to do research in a field typically has worked in that industry. Because that's where people with that expertise work.

duskwuff 9mo ago
And, in many cases, because that's where funding exists. This comes up somewhat frequently in discussions of pet food. Most of the companies doing research into pet food - e.g. doing feeding studies, nutritional analysis, etc - are the manufacturers of those foods. This isn't because there's some dark conspiracy of pet food companies to suppress independent research; it's simply because no one else is funding research in the field.

cheriot 9mo ago

We need an update of Thank You for Smoking

simplisticelk 9mo ago
You should give it a rewatch keeping in mind that it was financed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The message of the film comes across a bit differently in that light; much more libertarian/anti-government. Enjoyable film nonetheless!
blitzar 9mo ago
More doctors smoke facebook than any other social media

Jadiiee 9mo ago

My jaw stayed in place

BrenBarn 9mo ago

But what undisclosed ties might this study itself have?

princevegeta89 9mo ago

No surprise. Social media is a shithole.

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago

Experts say

h4kunamata 9mo ago

Since when is this news?? Whole industries are paid for decades, the hope are the independent journalists with no ties to anybody but the public they wanna reach. Find one independent journalist on YT with lots of information and sources for them, and you will noticed how we have been living in a lie.

hsuduebc2 9mo ago

This is ridiculously recurring pattern.

hsuduebc2 9mo ago

I’m half expecting headlines thirty years from now to talk about social media the way we now talk about leaded gasoline, a slow, population-wide exposure that messed with people’s minds and quietly dragged down cognition, wellbeing, and even the economy across whole generations.

everdrive 9mo ago

Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing today: extreme ideas, populism, the destruction of institutions. All of this because people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up.

decipherer 9mo ago
We have exited the age of information, and entered the age of irritation.
- HPsquared 9mo ago
  "Rage bait" is 2025 Oxford Word of the Year. We are reaching saturation levels now, I think, where people are becoming aware of it. https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/ https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
    I'm glad people are aware of it. 7 years I heard about The Scissor on SSC and wasn't sure if people would ever believe it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    Exposure is a good first step. But what action is taken with that awareness? We seem to be in that post truth era where being told what's happening before your eyes is at best met with apathy and at worst rejected.
gjsman-1000 9mo ago
> the destruction of institutions More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings? The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change. Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

chaps 9mo ago

Surprised it's not more, but it makes sense when you consider the sources of the data. Gotta have data sharing agreements, yeah?

dzink 9mo ago

How do you do objective research without a data pipeline? Social media companies can use user privacy as an excuse to not share feeds that influence users. The first step to fixing the wrongs is transparency, but there are no incentives for big tech to enable that.

potato3732842 9mo ago

Literally every industry is like this. Academia is basically a reputation laundering industry. If the cigarette people said smokes good or the oil people you'd never believe them. But they and their competitors fund labs at universities, and sure those universities may publish stuff they don't like from time to time, but overall things are gonna trend toward "not harmful to benefactors". And then what gets published gets used as the basis for decisions on how to direct your tax dollars, deploy state violence for or against certain things, etc, etc. And of course (some of) the academics want to do research that drives humanity forward or whatever, but they're basically stuck selling their labor to (after several layers in between) the donors for decades in order to eek out a little bit of what they want. It's not just "how the sausage is made" that's the problem. It's who you're sourcing the ingredients for, who you're paying off for the permit to run the factory, who's supplying you labor. You can't fix this with minor process adjustments.

devradardev 9mo ago

This is a clever approach to reduce token usage. In my experience with Gemini 3 for code analysis, the biggest bottleneck isn't just the logic, but the verbosity of standard languages consuming the context window. A targeted intermediate language like this could make 'thinking' models much more efficient for complex tasks.

irishcoffee 9mo ago
Almost like… a simplified set of instructions you would give a computer that get distilled down into machine code that executes on bare metal!

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Braxton1980 9mo ago

This means their research should be examined in more detail but unless their evidence they are being dishonest in some sense it doesn't invalidate their findings

deepriverfish 9mo ago

I'm surprised it's this low with how shady the social media industry is.

blackqueeriroh 9mo ago

Lol, should check out the reality of obesity science

wotsdat 9mo ago

[dead]

jbullock35 9mo ago

From the article: > A new preprint reports that in nearly one third of studies on social media appearing in major interdisciplinary journals, the authors have ties to industry that should be disclosed but aren’t. Some received funding from a social media company; others previously co-authored work with industry employees. Note that last part. It makes this effort seem silly: there's no conflict of interest just because one of your past co-authors at one time worked for someone in the industry.

HardwareLust 9mo ago

Only a third? That's better than I imagined, assuming that figure is accurate.

insane_dreamer 9mo ago

Considering that published findings are fairly damning when it comes to the impact of social media on society (and especially teenagers), the conclusion I draw from this is that the situation may be even worse than we think.