Social Media Jury Verdicts Show the Power of Supporting Research

Two juries made history last month. On March 24, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to warn users about platform dangers and protect children from sexual predators. A day later, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately building their apps to be addictive while their executives knew and failed to protect their youngest users. 

Hailed by some as Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” the verdicts are the first legal recognition of what a growing body of technology and media experts have found: that specific design features of digital platforms — not just the content that flows through them — influence human well-being in profound and measurable ways. 

Behind the scenes, philanthropy helped catalyze the growing interdisciplinary research field that laid the foundation for these moments.

Across the United States, labs housed at nonprofits and universities are combining social science with advanced computational research methods to study the information environment. Other research centers take those findings and test how platform design features shape behavior. Another group considers that evidence and weighs how public policy or private action might better serve communities. 

This research-to-policy pipeline is still nascent, but it is now spurring advocacy, sparking investigative journalism, and informing public conversation about the role of technology in our lives.

But the research field that studies technology, media, and information ecosystems faces existential challenges. Scholars’ ability to study online platforms largely depends on whether they can access data that tech companies are increasingly restricting. Researchers have been subject to lawsuits, government sanctions, and abrupt termination of federal funding. Most critically, researchers must compete for limited resources from a small number of funders. And while some foundations have made the connection between their missions and information ecosystems, most do so through funding individual projects.

Why Project Funding Has Limited Power

Yet project-based funding, however well intentioned, cannot by itself sustain the research field that makes such findings possible. When foundations fund research projects, they draw on infrastructure — university labs, data, and computing resources, and the accumulated body of peer-reviewed literature that establish credibility and context. The researchers who propose compelling research projects can do so only because that infrastructure exists, yet project grants replenish this infrastructure only marginally, through universities’ recovery of limited overhead costs. 

Project-based funding likewise incentivizes work that is in line with funders’ priorities rather than promoting open-ended scientific inquiry that produces durable knowledge. And for the most uncertain and ambitious scientific questions — the ones most likely to produce breakthroughs that reshape how courts, policymakers, and the public understand digital platforms — project-based funding discourages the intellectual risk-taking those questions require.

Project-based research funding also does not sufficiently take advantage of the economies of scale that collaborating with research universities might afford. When a foundation funds a university research center, that investment stands on the shoulders of a university’s essential assets, such as alumni donor networks, library resources, and talent pipelines. University research centers also benefit from proximity to scholars with expertise in other academic fields, which can yield unexpected collaboration and results. 

What’s more, project-based funding exacerbates a talent imbalance in Big Tech’s favor. Universities, nonprofit organizations, and technology companies compete for the same pool of elite talent. But absent the promise of sustained general funding, many candidates often choose the private sector’s stability over a university or nonprofit research role. Because of this, tech firms are consistently many steps ahead of civil society, leading to hype-driven marketing and a lack of independent evidence about their products’ societal impact.

Holistic Funding Enables Advances

To make a more meaningful difference in this space, philanthropy must think bigger. 

The dominant practice of project-based funding for technology and media research unnecessarily constrains the field’s impact. We should instead invest in the institutional infrastructure that allows independent inquiry to flourish and science to progress. Such a field-building approach means investments that help establish or significantly expand research centers at universities and nonprofits. It means awarding flexible, multiyear operating support. It means investing in shared data repositories and technical tools that enable researchers to collect vast amounts of platform data and make it accessible to researchers far and wide. And this approach means supporting the spaces where experts connect, debate, and share knowledge.

Knight Foundation has taken this more holistic approach. 

Since expanding our research investments in 2019, we have committed more than $150 million to building the field of research that studies technology, media, and information ecosystems. We have partnered with universities to establish 10 new academic centers, made institutional investments in nine more, and also scaled several civil society organizations’ research programs.

Our university partners recognize the societal demand for this work and have matched our grants with significant commitments of their own, multiplying the impact of every dollar and helping institutionalize the field. 

Where we awarded project-based grants, we did so sparingly and deliberately — to test emerging research areas or support field leaders whose institutions were not positioned to host a center — always as a complement to infrastructure investments, never a substitute. 

And true to our roots in journalism, we structure our support for research centers to preserve our grantees’ independence, guarding against concerns that our support might unduly influence the findings. We believe this approach strengthens both our grantees’ credibility and our own.

Independence and Scale for the AI Era

With this runway, this diverse and interdisciplinary field of experts have established themselves and their institutions as trusted thought leaders. They are frequently cited in public dialogue about social technologies today, and they are regularly called on to share their expertise with legislators, regulators, and courts. And as artificial intelligence stands to transform how society interacts with information and how people communicate with each other, the research field’s continued independence and scale will be vital.

Sustaining that capacity will require foundations and wealthy donors who see this work as mission-critical. Funding a robust body of independent research will give all of society — advocacy organizations, journalists, policymakers, and the public — the tools necessary to exercise agency over technology and media today.

Experts have characterized the Meta and YouTube court verdicts as a watershed moment akin to Big Tobacco’s unraveling in the 1990s; an apt, but incomplete analogy. Big Tobacco’s accountability moment was supported by decades of research that broke through because of its independence and scale. 

We are only at the beginning of that process for digital platforms. With the right approach, a philanthropy-wide push to fund independent technology research could turn last month’s watershed moment into one that lasts.