If you were paid to deactivate your Facebook account, would you?  It's something to think about because soon you could be asked to do just that.

A couple weeks ago, the social media platform announced a new research project they would be conducting to find out what effect, if any, social media has on democracy. They acknowledge Facebook has become a "stage for democratic debate"

To continue to amplify all that is good for democracy on social media, and mitigate against that which is not, we need more objective, dispassionate, empirically grounded research. We need to better understand whether social media makes us more polarized as a society...

In order to conduct this research, Facebook will randomly be asking people to deactivate their Facebook account leading up the upcoming presidential election. Pages will temporarily be deleted one to six weeks prior to.

Not everyone will be asked to delete their accounts, though. Some will be asked if they are willing to change the activity of their News Feed including seeing more or less of ads and/or posts in retail, entertainment, or politics. This also requires partaking in surveys and answering research questions.

About 200K-400K users are expected to participate and will be paid $10-$20 per week. If you do opt-in, you get to choose how many weeks you're willing to partake.

The same will be applied to Instagram. In fact, that's where I personally received my invitation to participate. I chose to opt-out though considering I need Facebook for work purposes.

Facebook has hired outside researchers to conduct the study. A total of 17 experts will collaborate on the study. To ensure there is no financial incentive, Facebook will not be paying the group.

The results of this study isn't expected to be released until middle of 2021.

In case you do asked to join, read up on it before you do here, which also includes a list of FAQs.

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