Meta Still Calling the Shots on Direction of Research 
On Wednesday, Meta cheered the release of yet another paper that appeared to cast doubt on the relationship between Facebook use and negative mental health outcomes. Like the studies published last week, this analysis was produced using data that Meta willingly handed over to researchers – a “home court advantage” that naturally favors Meta itself. The paper, which was written by two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, concludes that concerns with Facebook’s mental health impacts have been overblown, and that Facebook use may even be related to positive mental wellbeing. Professor Andrew Przybylski, who was one of the report’s authors, previously called on Meta to allow researchers more access to data related to children’s mental health. Several days after his letter was published, Pryzbylski told Business Insider that he didn’t believe Meta’s leaked studies on the negative relationship between Instagram use and teen girls’ mental health were a “smoking gun” that should be taken seriously by experts. 
 
Meta’s decision to release data to a behavioral psychologist who had already questioned the connection between mental wellbeing and social media use illustrates the core issue with this approach to research. The Oxford Internet Institute, furthermore, has received funding from Meta and has been criticized for failing to disclose financial relationships between its researchers and tech companies. In that same piece, a former “academic outreach officer” for Google described how large tech companies, including Meta, would dedicated resources to courting academics and building relationships with research institutions. Simply put, tech companies can pick and choose which data goes to which experts – hardly a recipe for the type of balanced research that policymakers need to craft substantive regulation.