Jeff Horwitz was chasing down a tip on Instagram last year when he stumbled on a particularly troubling finding. As a technology reporter covering Meta for the Wall Street Journal and author of a book about the company, Broken Code, Horwitz has seen some of the worst content people post on Meta’s platforms. But this Instagram account he found, which appeared to belong to a 14-year-old selling sexual photos of herself, stopped him short. Even more startling: Horwitz noticed Instagram was recommending additional accounts to him that seemed to be trafficking in similar content. We’ve got a problem, he remembers thinking. Horwitz knew he’d need help not just scoping the size of the issue, but also navigating a sea of potentially illegal posts. So he turned to a group of researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory. The group, which included Reneé DiResta, Alex Stamos and David Thiel, had deep experience studying Meta’s recommendation systems, and Stamos and Thiel had spent years on Facebook’s security team before joining Stanford. Working in collaboration, Horwitz and the Stanford researchers soon uncovered hundreds of accounts that appeared to be selling “self-generated child sexual abuse material” on Instagram and found that Instagram’s recommendation engine was playing a key role in connecting suspected buyers and sellers.
In June of last year, Horwitz and a colleague wrote up their findings in a bombshell story documenting the “vast pedophile network” on Instagram. The Stanford team published their own detailed paper the same day. The response was explosive. Meta told the Journal it was setting up an internal task force to address the investigation’s findings. Congressional leaders announced inquiries. And New Mexico’s attorney general used the story to support a lawsuit accusing Meta of enabling child sexual exploitation and mental health harms. For Horwitz, the Stanford researchers’ input was essential to getting that information out into the public as safely and robustly as possible. “There was clearly a gravitas and a skill set that we didn’t have,” Horwitz says. The Stanford Internet Observatory, housed at the university’s Cyber Policy Center, is just one of more than 60 institutions that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has supported since it set out to catalyze a field of research focused on digital media and democracy in 2019. At the time, the foundation’s hope was to address the rising pollution of the online information ecosystem by launching something akin to a public health moment for the internet.
Since then, Knight Foundation has committed more than $107 million in grants to fund research on a wide range of topics related to how information travels online, from the study of mis- and disinformation to antitrust enforcement, Section 230 reform and broader trust and safety issues. Together, these grants have supported the work of more than 800 people, including researchers, administrative staff and students. Knight hasn’t been alone in this endeavor either. Other organizations, including Hewlett Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Omidyar Network and the National Science Foundation, have contributed significantly to the field with funding efforts of their own. As this field has grown, so has its impact on the world outside the research community. In 2022 alone, Knight grantees published more than 900 articles, participated in more than 900 speaking engagements and testified before Congress 15 times. But as Horwitz’s collaboration
with the Stanford team demonstrates, those numbers only tell part of the story. What they don’t show is what happens next: How do people in positions of power actually respond to and act on that information? How has this field of research driven technology-related policies and investigations inside the government? How has it influenced tech companies’ own content decisions and user guidelines? What front page news wouldn’t have been possible without research findings to back it up, and how does research help advocacy groups rally public support around a cause? The answers to those questions can be hard to track. Often, research travels a circuitous route through news coverage and closed-door briefings on its way to making an impact in the world. This paper—which draws on interviews with roughly 40 sources across government, media, the tech industry and civil society groups—is an attempt to trace that route. It finds that, in just a few short years, researchers in this field have played an instrumental role in driving legislative proposals, platform policies, product changes, media coverage and advocacy campaigns. While the impact of a select group of researchers, including at the Stanford Internet Observatory, is easy to pinpoint, the growth of this field has also had a cumulative effect in terms of setting the agenda for what government leaders, tech workers, journalists and advocates are paying attention to.
As Yasmin Green, CEO of the Google research subsidiary Jigsaw, put it, “There’s more than one thing that publishing research does. Of course it can and should inform further research and action, but the other thing it does is spotlight topics in the public debate. That’s an area where this research community has grown in not just size and sophistication, but it’s also grown in clout.” And yet, even as conversations for this report revealed what’s working in the field, they also revealed what’s not. Slow publishing timelines and research questions that aren’t aligned with practitioners’ needs remain significant impediments to impact. Meanwhile, the overreliance on personal connections at large tech companies can give select “superstar” researchers preferential access to data, while others—particularly researchers operating outside of the U.S.—wind up locked out. That has downstream effects on who gets funded, covered in the press and ultimately called upon by decision makers in government and industry. For funders like Knight, these challenges are also opportunities. By elevating new, emerging voices in the field and investing in time-sensitive ways to synthesize research findings for public consumption, Knight can help maximize the impact of vitally needed research.