Exploring A New Model of Industry/Academic Collaboration: the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study

This talk will give an overview of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study, a partnership between Meta researchers and independent external academics to understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the US 2020 elections. Following the principles of independence, transparency, and consent, this project has implemented innovative features for this type of collaboration, such as pre-registration of analysis plans, no pre-publication approval by Meta, IRB review, and the release of data required to enable replication. This talk will discuss the design of the collaboration, the data that has been collected, and the studies that were pre-registered.