The Silicon Tower

[Commentary] I am a data junkie. As I researched my column last week about the implications of Facebook’s study on the sharing of political content, I practically drooled over the data the social network had released as part of it. In order to identify patterns in how stories from various news websites are shared on Facebook -- and conclude that the far left and far right are particularly siloed in their exposure to political ideas -- I had to both draw upon qualitative background knowledge (about politics and political websites) and assess ambiguous quantitative measures (like Facebook shares). While that background knowledge is available in libraries and on Amazon, the data was only accessible because a private company allowed it be.

For an increasing amount of data-driven research, whether it’s me sifting through social shares or AI researchers trying to train a computer to identify a cat, we need companies’ data. And for the most part, they don’t want to give it to us. With the rise of Silicon Valley as we know it today, the private sector has gained pre-eminence in driving technology forward, with massive tech revenues supplanting military-industrial complex dollars in many areas of computer technology. While the coupling of defense concerns and technological innovation is inherently problematic, one side effect of these public-private partnerships was a traditionally collective approach to scientific research; the government might have held some of the purse strings, but it didn’t micromanage the research. But in the case of a company like Facebook, the research takes place behind closed corporate doors and materials are released only at Facebook’s discretion. We should be concerned about the increasing transfer of a portion of science and social science research away from the public eye and into the corporate sector.