Northeastern Researchers Gain Unprecedented Access to Facebook Data to Study Fake News Spread

The global rise of fake news and misinformation continues to disrupt democracies worldwide, influencing elections in the United States and India while fueling civil unrest in countries like Sudan. As this digital epidemic spreads, researchers have long debated how misinformation proliferates—but have lacked the data to draw definitive conclusions.

Now, a groundbreaking research initiative at Northeastern University aims to solve this puzzle. Four professors from the university have been granted rare access to closely guarded Facebook data that could reveal crucial insights into how fake news circulates on social media platforms.

“It’s very exciting,” says Nick Beauchamp, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern who leads the university’s research team. “Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla, and the opportunity to work with their data in a way that’s ethical and secure is an exciting one.”

The interdisciplinary research team includes political scientist David Lazer, economist Donghee Jo, and computer scientist Lu Wang from Northeastern, along with Kenneth Joseph from the State University of New York at Buffalo. They join the first cohort of researchers worldwide granted permission to analyze Facebook’s internal data for insights into social media’s impact on democratic processes.

The team will gain access to three valuable datasets from Facebook. The first includes information from public accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, allowing researchers to track how news items gain popularity across these platforms. The second contains data on political advertisements that ran in several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Ukraine, Israel, and the European Union. The third dataset provides information about specific URLs shared by at least 100 unique Facebook users.

With these resources, the researchers aim to construct a comprehensive map tracing fake news posts back to their origins—potentially resolving a fundamental question about misinformation’s spread.

“We know there’s a problem with fake news,” Beauchamp explains. “What we don’t know is whether it’s a problem of the institutions and the moment in which we’re living, or if it’s a problem that evolved from peer-sharing.”

The conventional theory suggests that social media platforms have disrupted traditional news dissemination by allowing unverified information to spread directly from person to person, bypassing the vetting processes of established media organizations. The Northeastern study will finally put this theory to a rigorous test.

The research could reveal two distinct patterns. One possibility is that fake, misleading, or ideologically extreme news primarily originates from established media companies and is pushed to users through corporate accounts or algorithmic recommendations—placing responsibility on institutional actors. Alternatively, researchers might find that misinformation spreads predominantly through peer-sharing networks, indicating that the breakdown of traditional media gatekeeping has fundamentally altered how information circulates.

A key advantage for the researchers is Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change, which shifted priority from publisher content to posts from friends and family. By analyzing fake news propagation before and after this pivotal change, the team can determine whether people or algorithms are more responsible for misinformation’s spread.

“From my point of view, the content on Facebook tends to be rich and robust, and speaks to the actual demographics of the U.S.,” notes Beauchamp. “It’s always been something that’s interested us; we just haven’t had access to it until now.”

The research comes at a critical moment for Facebook, which has faced intense scrutiny for its role in various democratic crises—from allowing Cambridge Analytica to access millions of users’ private data to failing to block hundreds of fake accounts from running ads designed to influence U.S. elections in 2016 and 2018.

The project is funded through a grant program established by the Social Science Research Council and Social Science One, specifically designed to help scholars study Facebook’s impact on global democracy. This unprecedented collaboration between academic researchers and the social media giant represents a potential turning point in understanding—and eventually combating—the fake news phenomenon that continues to threaten democratic institutions worldwide.