Mining Facebook data for science

Friday, July 20, 2018 - 00:11 in Mathematics & Economics

It seems Christmas is coming early this year for social scientists. That’s because just months after Harvard’s Gary King wrote an academic paper about a system that would allow researchers to access the massive data troves held by Facebook and other private companies, it is set to become a reality. Along with collaborator Nathaniel Persily at Stanford University, King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, created an organization called Social Science One that will lead the effort to identify data inside Facebook, prepare it for researchers, and fund numerous scholars to analyze the data. The organization is today making available for research the first of what King says will be many data sets, more than half a trillion numbers that include every link clicked by Facebook users in the last year, information on the types of people who clicked, and indicators of whether links were judged to be intentionally false news stories. “As...

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net