It is worth acknowledging that the social media platforms can, of course,
choose to release the results of their own internal research. Indeed, many
seminal papers using Facebook data referenced throughout this volume were
written or coauthored by internal Facebook researchers. The concern here is
that, to the extent that we are reliant on employees of the platforms for research,
we have to wrestle with the implications of ﬁrms reserving the right to approve
papers written by their employees before they are submitted for peer-review.
This is a version of what is known in academia as “the ﬁle drawer problem,” a
term used to refer to a concern that positive results are more likely to be
published than negative results due to journals’ preferences for positive
ﬁndings, thus presenting a skewed overall view of what we know about a
particular topic (Franco, Malhotra, and Simonovits 2014). However, the
problem can be even more pernicious when we consider for-proﬁt companies
Social_Media_and_Democracy