Facebook’s first effort to open up its platform for academics to study its impact on elections has been thrown into doubt, after the social media group failed to hand over its data and cited privacy concerns.

In April 2018, Facebook announced it would hand over a petabyte, or a million gigabytes, of data including how people using its platforms had clicked on links to other websites, to an independent research group called Social Science One.

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Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and co-chair of Social Science One, said many academics were “deeply frustrated” with Facebook but that “their privacy objections [were] not frivolous”.