[Air-L] Instances of company / gov't pressure to change research?

[Christian Sandvig]

Dear AoIR colleagues,

Have you experienced corporate or government pressure to block publication
of Internet, app, or social media platform -related research, or to change
findings? e.g., Have you received a cease and desist letter? Has a funder
or your employer used a pre-submission or pre-publication review to edit
work? I have encountered a number of instances of this and I wonder if
there are other cases out there that we can learn from. There are already
many public examples, but I am wondering if there are private cases people
would be willing to share. If you're not familiar with this topic, a quick
public example is the Spotify Swedish Research Council complaint. (
https://www.gothiccountry.se/blog/221-spotify-attack-on-free-and-independent-research-disguised-as-violation-of-terms-of-service.html)
or what happened at Google (
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/
). The end result will be a piece of writing about this. I am not sure of
the format/venue yet. Thank you in advance for any leads. If it helps, I
can speak with you about the situation in confidence.

Sincerely,
Christian

--
https://esc.umich.edu/
https://umich.edu/~csandvig/