Integrity Foundational research awards
About
Facebook’s efforts on its Integrity initiatives are at the heart of the company’s mission to bring the world closer together. We want social technologies to be a place where people can express themselves freely, fairly, and safely around the world. Over the last two years, we’ve invested heavily in technology and people to more effectively remove bad content and behavior from our services. While we do a lot to understand these problematic issues, the effectiveness of these efforts relies strongly on our engagement with foundational research and partnerships with social scientists around issues like misinformation, news, polarization, trust, and conflict.
Recently, Facebook offered a competitive call to researchers interested in exploring issues at the intersection of misinformation and polarization related to social communication technologies. Our goal for these awards is to support the growth of the scientific community in these developing spaces and to contribute to a shared understanding across the broader industry on how social technology companies can address social issues on their platforms.
For this set of awards, we also focused on studies that drew on traditional social science methods like interviews, surveys, ethnographic observation, content analyses, and survey/behavioral experiments, or innovative mixed methodological approaches that combine these methods with other data. No Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp data will be provided to recipients, and Facebook will offer these grants as unrestricted gifts, allowing researchers to conduct the research with independence.
We hope that these research projects will contribute shared insights with the larger scientific, policy, and industry communities, as well as our research and product teams at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Applications Are Currently CLosed
Application Timeline
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Winners Announced
Winning Proposals
Today we are pleased to announce the winning proposals for projects that span India, United Kingdom, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Pakistan, Brazil, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, South Africa, Austria, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States:
The Effects of Social Network Affordances on Political Discussion Health
Lead PI: Yphtach Lelkes, University of Pennsylvania
Understanding and Preventing the Effects of Repetition on Belief
Lead PI: Lisa K. Fazio, Vanderbilt University
Variation in User Behavior & Content Moderate Psychological Polarization
Lead PI: Jaime Settle, College of William & Mary
Lowering Selectivity & Polarization: 3-Country Experiments and Web Tracking
Lead PI: Magdalena Wojcieszak, University of California, Davis
Understanding the Impact of Digital Literacy on Misinformation in Pakistan
Lead PI: Ayesha Ali Lahore, University of Management Sciences (LUMS)
Effects of Social Media on The American Public Sphere
Lead PI: Diana C. Mutz, University of Pennsylvania
Social Media and Populism in Brazil and Mexico
Lead PI: Scott W. Desposato, The Regents of the University of California; University of California San Diego
Political Violence in the United States and Beyond
Lead PI: Lilliana Mason, University of Maryland, College Park
Explaining Political Misinformation
Lead PI: Shanto Iyengar, Stanford University
Who Can Best Dispel Rumors? Two Experiments on Misinformation in India
Lead PI: Simon Chauchard, Columbia University
Misinformation on Social Media: Investigating the Role of Digital Literacy
Lead PI: Andrew Guess, Princeton University
Measuring and Modeling Susceptibility to Misinformation on Social Media
Lead PI: R. Kelly Garrett, Ohio State University (OSU)
Decoding the Weaponising of Pop Culture on WhatsApp in Singapore & Malaysia
Lead PI: Crystal Abidin, Curtin University
Processing Polarizing Content
Lead PI: Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud, University of Texas
Misinformation, Self-Interest and Cognitive Style
Lead PI: Mathieu Turgeon, University of Western Ontario
Visual Misinformation in Global Perspective: Platforms, Devices, and Users
Lead PI: Cristian Vaccari, Loughborough University
Evaluating the Effectiveness of WhatsApp Fact-Checking in India
Lead PI: Brendan James Nyhan, Regents of the University of Michigan
Understanding Reaction to Emotion-Elicit Provocative News among Malaysians
Lead PI: Ezhar Tamam, Universiti Putra Malaysia
Ideological Distance, Identity Cues, & Affective Political Polarization
Lead PI: Christopher A. Bail, Duke University
Demonstrating the Minimal Effects of Facebook on Affective Polarization
Lead PI: Sean Jeremy Westwood, Dartmouth College
Information Pollution: Misinformation in the 2019 EU Parliament Election
Lead PI: Claes de Vreese, University of Amsterdam
Thank you to all the researchers that submitted proposals, and congratulations to the winners. To view our currently open research awards and to subscribe to our Research Awards email list, visit our Research Awards page.