Social Science One is one of the most ambitious academic partnership projects Facebook has participated in through FORT to date. Started by Stanford law professor Nate Persily and Harvard political science professor Gary King in 2018, the group intended to set up a system for outside academics to study internal data generated by Facebook’s 2.2 billion users, like how many times a URL has been viewed across the platform and which demographics viewed it.

Persily, the Stanford law professor who co-founded Social Science One, resigned from the organization ahead of the 2020 elections and is now advocating for new laws to address issues between social media companies and researchers. Such legislation would force companies like Facebook to share more data with researchers and loosen the privacy laws around them doing so. This could resolve the longstanding debate between researchers and social media companies about whether companies can legally share user data without violating privacy laws.

“Unless you create some kind of legal immunity for companies sharing data, and a legal compulsion for them to share that data, you can’t win the argument, because all it looks like is risk,” Persily said. “I think that sharing data is legal, but I’m not the one paying $5 billion if I’m fined.”

Persily added that Social Science One was a substantial step forward in getting Facebook to give researchers more freedom to study its platform. He commended Facebook for taking part in it.

But ultimately, Persily said, companies like Facebook need more incentive to participate in such projects without fear of getting in trouble with regulators, who also don’t want to see Facebook repeat the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Some lawmakers, like Klobuchar and Warner, have criticized Facebook for not sharing enough data with researchers. At the same time, they have also called for these companies to do a better job protecting user privacy.

“The spread of misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine has had dire consequences,” Klobuchar said in a statement to Recode. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and it is vital that they are transparent about the misinformation on their platforms so researchers and policymakers can better assess and tackle this problem.”

For Persily and many others in the academic community, getting researchers access to better data is a key step before regulators can solve other questions.

“Whether we can answer the question about whether Facebook is killing people with Covid misinformation depends on if outsiders are able to assess how much misinformation actually exists on Facebook,” said Persily. “Data access is the linchpin for all other social media issues.”