From Washington Post
How tech giants use money, access to steer academic research
By Joseph Menn and Naomi Nix
Tech giants including Google and Facebook parent Meta have dramatically ramped up charitable giving to university campuses over the past several years — giving them influence over academics studying such critical topics as artificial intelligence, social media and disinformation...
“They pay for the research of the very people in a position to criticize them,” said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley professor in computer science and the School of Information. “It’s what the oil and gas industry has done with climate change, and it’s what the tobacco companies did with cigarette research.”
Farid, who says he has taken money from most of the major companies, got $2 million from Meta in 2019 to study deepfakes and integrity in news posts on Facebook. But the following year, after he was critical of Meta in a media interview, he says that a company employee told him the social media giant was upset. Though Farid doesn’t think the conversation was intended to be menacing, it was an unwelcome reminder of who was paying the bills...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
