Social Media Research

We are researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University. We are looking into ways of improving user experience on social media as well as our understanding of user preferences and decision making. WHY INSTALL? - You help the academic community understand how people interact with social media. - The extension can improve your user experience on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. PRIVACY Protecting the privacy of our users is of paramount importance both to us and our universities (the study has been approved by the internal review boards of the University of Chicago and Columbia University). You can learn about what we collect and how we ensure the protection of personal data in our Privacy Policy (at the bottom of the page). In a nutshell, we focus on the page content on three social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, including ads, posts, comments, and retweets, as well as the time and date of your activity. CONTACTS If you have questions or concerns about the study or the extension, you can contact the researchers at gb2683@columbia.edu or mstalinski@uchicago.edu. If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this research, feel you have been harmed, or wish to discuss other study-related concerns with someone who is not part of the research team, you can contact the University of Chicago Social & Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB) Office by phone at (773) 702-2915, or by email at sbs-irb@uchicago.edu. You can also contact the Morningside IRB, Columbia University, telephone (212) 305-5883, email: askirb@columbia.edu. CONSENT By installing this extension, you certify that you are at least 18 years old and agree to participate in the research study outlined above. The extension may optimize your Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook pages by changing page content, however, for the avoidance of doubt, we would never add content that would not otherwise be displayed to you. If you do not wish to participate, please do not install the extension. Upon the completion of the study, we will tell you a little bit about our results as well as the exact ways in which we were customizing pages on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. PRIVACY POLICY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH Protecting the privacy of our users is of paramount importance both to us and our universities. The study has been approved by the internal review boards of the University of Chicago and Columbia University under numbers IRB22-0073 and AAAT9887. We will collect page content displayed to you on three platforms: Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, as well as the time and date of collection. This includes information such as what ads were displayed in the feed as well as before and within YouTube videos, the texts of posts, likes, retweets. We will also collect the time you spend (but not the content) on websites related to social media. These will be encrypted and securely stored in our database. The extension can also obtain authentication tokens to make requests to Twitter API to customize the content that you see, but we will not store such information. For the avoidance of doubt, we never collect, record, or handle any of your private messages, such as in Facebook Messenger. Data are being collected exclusively for the purposes of this study. Data collected by the extension will be securely stored, and no identifiable information will be shared outside the research team. Furthermore, any such information will be deleted after the project concludes. If you would like us to delete your identifiable information at an earlier stage, please contact us, and we will do so promptly.