Moving at the Speed of Facebook to Improve Experimentation on Consumers

As we learned from reading Michelle Meyer on The Faculty Lounge today, Facebook has issued a Press Release on Research at Facebook.  As we discussed previously here, Internet-based companies have decided that they will self-regulate their own research programs.  Here are the highlights:

• Guidelines: we’ve given researchers clearer guidelines. If proposed work is focused on studying particular groups or populations (such as people of a certain age) or if it relates to content that may be considered deeply personal (such as emotions) it will go through an enhanced review process before research can begin. The guidelines also require further review if the work involves a collaboration with someone in the academic community.
• Review: we’ve created a panel including our most senior subject-area researchers, along with people from our engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams, that will review projects falling within these guidelines. This is in addition to our existing privacy cross-functional review for products and research.
• Training: we’ve incorporated education on our research practices into Facebook’s six-week training program, called bootcamp, that new engineers go through, as well as training for others doing research. We’ll also include a section on research in the annual privacy and security training that is required of everyone at Facebook.
• Research website: our published academic research is now available at a single location and will be updated regularly.

Based on the New York Times article we cited in our last post on this subject, we hoped that Internet companies would at least subject research designs to outside review.  It looks like Facebook’s review process is going to be entirely in-house.