Facebook should grant $10M to a neutral third party - a research facility - and let them conduct an unbiased study on the effect of social media. Then report the results no matter what.
It will never happen, for two reasons.
1) Facebook should well know that social media is bad for us (how much bad, I'm not sure), and therefore would never fund anything like this.
2) Even if an anonymous Bitcoin millionaire funds the research, it's hard to find a research institute / entity / team that would gladly take some money, only to know that any chance of receiving future grants from FB/Google/Microsoft/Amazon just went to zero.
I think these two FB researchers are well intentioned. But I would never trust anything like this.
Good and evil is always relative to ones position.
This is a PR response to former FB employees posting/blogging in recent weeks that FB is bad and they wished they had not done what they did.[1] This is strictly a counter PR move FB had to make.
A minimization of the issue through relativism, lack of objectivity (perpetrated through the omission of the most relevant details) is certainly what Facebook hopes.
> This is a PR response [...]
There comes a time when there is a need for change, words only serve as a mean to manufacture consent.
Facebook should grant $10M to a neutral third party - a research facility - and let them conduct an unbiased study on the effect of social media. Then report the results no matter what.
It will never happen, for two reasons.
1) Facebook should well know that social media is bad for us (how much bad, I'm not sure), and therefore would never fund anything like this.
2) Even if an anonymous Bitcoin millionaire funds the research, it's hard to find a research institute / entity / team that would gladly take some money, only to know that any chance of receiving future grants from FB/Google/Microsoft/Amazon just went to zero.
I think these two FB researchers are well intentioned. But I would never trust anything like this.