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

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.

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?

Original article: "Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research" - 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. "

We need an update of Thank You for Smoking

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

No surprise. Social media is a shithole.

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.

My jaw stayed in place

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.

Lol, should check out the reality of obesity science

A system built to yield to perfect lobbyism.

Experts say

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.

This is ridiculously recurring pattern.

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.

But what undisclosed ties might this study itself have?

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