In an unprecedented move, Meta is opening its data to a small group of researchers to study how Instagram affects young people’s mental health.
This program debuted in collaboration with the Center for Open Science (COS). As part of the pilot program, researchers will get access to Instagram data for six months.
More specifically, that data includes information like a young person’s account settings, how many accounts that person follows, and how often they use Instagram.
The data will not include identifying information and specific posts, messages, and comments. COS researchers also must get both the young person and their parents to agree to work on this study.
“As this topic [of teen safety] has heated up, we have felt like we needed to find a way to share data in a responsible way, in a privacy-preserving way,” Curtiss Cobb, vice president of research at Meta, told The Atlantic.
Why is the Center for Open Science researching Instagram?
It was only recently that the U.S. Surgeon General proposed putting cigarette-style warning labels on social media platforms. Teens and their parents would be “reminded regularly” by these proposed labels that social media “has not been proven safe.”
In the wake of all this, COS appears confident that this study will provide some much-needed insight and answers to the burning questions we all have about young people, mental health, and social media.
“While social media data is typically logged for the purposes of providing digital services and not for the purposes of scholarly research, social media data has the potential to contribute to the understanding of well-being when combined with other sources of data such as from surveys or other behavioral studies,” COS said in a website post.
“It’s reasonable for people to have these questions,” Cobb told The Atlantic. “If we have the data that can illuminate it, and it can be shared in a responsible way, it’s in all of our interests to do that.”
