research – Our Story Insight

Meta’s court losses spell trouble for AI research, consumer safety

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:29:17 +0000

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves the Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles after defending the company in a landmark social media addiction trial in Los Angeles, United States, on February 19, 2026.

Jon Putman | Anadolu | Getty Images

Over a decade ago, Meta – then known as Facebook – hired researchers in the social sciences with the goal of analyzing how the social network’s services were impacting users. It was a way for the company and its peers to show they were serious about understanding the benefits and potential risks of their innovations.

But as Meta’s court losses this week illustrate, the researchers’ work can become a liability. Brian Boland, a former Facebook executive who testified in both trials — one in New Mexico and the other in Los Angeles — says the damning findings of Meta’s internal research and documents seemingly contradicted how the company portrayed itself in public. Juries in the two trials determined that Meta inadequately policed its site, putting kids in harm’s way.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company began clamping down on its research teams a few years ago after a Facebook researcher, Frances Haugen, became a prominent whistleblower. The newer crop of tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic subsequently invested heavily in researchers and charged them with studying the impact of modern AI on users, and publishing their findings.

With AI now getting outsized attention for the harmful effects it’s having on some users, those companies must ask if it’s in their best interest to continue funding research, or to suppress it.

“There was a period of time when there were teams that were created internally who could start to look at things and, for a brief window, you had some absolutely outstanding researchers who were looking at what was happening on these products with a little bit more free rein than I understand they have today,” Boland said in an interview.

Meta’s two defeats this week centered on different cases but they had a common theme: The company didn’t share what it knew about its products’ harms with the general public.

Jury members had to evaluate millions of corporate documents, including executive emails, presentations and internal research conducted by Meta’s staff. The documents included internal surveys appearing to show a concerning percentage of teenage users receiving unwanted sexual advances on Instagram. There was also research, which Meta eventually halted, implying that people who curbed their use of Facebook became less depressed and anxious.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the cases didn’t rely solely on internal research to make their arguments, but those studies helped bolster their positions about Meta’s alleged culpability. Meta’s defense teams argued that certain research was old, taken out of context and misleading, presenting a flawed view of how the company operates and how it views safety.

‘Both sides of the story’

“The jury got to hear both sides of the story and a very fair presentation of the facts, and they got to make a decision based on what they saw,” Boland said. “And both juries, with very different cases, came back with clear verdicts.”

Meta and Google’s YouTube, which was also a defendant in the L.A. trial, said they would appeal.

Lisa Strohman, a psychologist and attorney who served as an in-house expert consultant for the New Mexico suit, said leaders at Meta and across the tech industry may have thought they could use internal research to their advantage, winning favor from the public.

“I think what they failed to recognize is that researchers are parents and family members,” Strohman said. “And I think that what they failed to realize was that these people weren’t going to be bought.”

Whatever public relations win executives were expecting backfired when the research began to spill out to the public. The most damaging incident for Meta took place in 2021, when Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, leaked a trove of documents that suggested the company knew of the potential harms of its products.

Frances Haugen, former Facebook employee, speaks during a hearing of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology on Capitol Hill December 1, 2021, in Washington, DC.

Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images

Haugen’s “disclosures were a significant turning point globally – not just for the companies themselves but for researchers, policymakers and the broader public,” said Kate Blocker, director of research and program at the nonprofit Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

The leaks also led to major changes at Meta and in the tech industry, which began to weed out research that could be viewed as counterproductive for the companies. Many teams studying alleged harms and related issues were cut, CNBC previously reported.

Some companies also began removing certain tools and features of their services that third-party researchers utilized to study their platforms.

“Companies may now view ongoing research as a liability, but independent, third-party research must continue to be supported,” Blocker said.

Much of the internal research used in this week’s trials didn’t include new revelations, and many of the documents were previously released by other whistleblowers, said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. What the trials added, Haworth said, were the “the very emails, the very words, the very screenshots, the internal marketing presentations, the memos,” that offered necessary context.

As the tech industry now pushes aggressively into AI, companies like Meta, OpenAI and Google have been prioritizing products over research and safety. It’s a trend that concerns Blocker, who said that, “much like with social media before it, there is limited public visibility into what AI companies are studying about their products.”

“AI companies seem to be mostly studying the models themselves – model behavior, model interpretability, and alignment – but there is a significant gap in research regarding the impact of chatbots and digital assistants on child development,” Blocker said. “AI companies have a chance to not repeat the mistakes of the past – we urgently need to establish systems of transparency and access that share what these companies know about their platforms with the public and support further independent evaluation.”

WATCH: Regulatory pressure to follow after landmark social media verdict.

Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

The post Meta’s court losses spell trouble for AI research, consumer safety appeared first on Our Story Insight.

OpenAI Unveils New A.I. Agent for Research

admin — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:33:54 +0000

A week ago, OpenAI released a tool that can go online to shop for groceries or book a restaurant reservation. Now it is offering A.I. technology that can gather information from across the internet and synthesize it in concise reports.

OpenAI unveiled the new tool, called Deep Research, with a demonstration on YouTube on Sunday, days after showing the technology to lawmakers, policymakers and other officials in Washington.

“It can do complex research tasks that might take a person anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said at the event in Washington. By contrast, Deep Research can accomplish such tasks in five to 30 minutes, depending on the complexity.

Artificial intelligence researchers call this kind of technology an A.I. agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can use other software and services on the internet. This might involve anything from ordering dinner via DoorDash to synthesizing information from across the internet.

During the briefing on Capitol Hill, Mr. Weil showed the technology gathering information about Albert Einstein. He asked the tool to put together a detailed report about the physicist for a hypothetical Senate staff member preparing for a congressional hearing where Einstein is a nominee for U.S. Secretary of Energy.

In addition to providing information about Einstein’s background and personality, it generated five questions that a senator could ask the physicist to determine whether he was the right person for the job.

“It can surf the web and understand text and images and P.D.F.s,” Mr. Weil said. “And it can do this recursively. It can do one search and that leads to other searches and then it can synthesize all the information it has learned.”

Mr. Weil said that the reports generated by the tool included citations showing where the information was found. But A.I. technologies like this can still get things wrong or even make up information — a phenomenon that A.I. researchers call “hallucination.” This may mean that it provides incorrect citations.

OpenAI said that the tool may struggle to distinguish authoritative information from rumors and that it often failed to accurately convey when it was uncertain about the information it was delivering.

Still, Mr. Weil argued that the tool could help the United States accelerate economic growth. He added that the tool would be particularly useful for people in fields like finance, science and law.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)

OpenAI said that, beginning on Sunday, Deep Research would be available to anyone who is subscribed to ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month service that provides access to all of the company’s latest tools. It plans to also offer the tool via its other paid services.

The tool is based on the same technology that drives ChatGPT. This technology is what A.I. researchers call a neural network — a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing data.

In recent months, OpenAI has developed versions of the technology that can “reason” through tasks, determining through trial and error what actions to take. Deep Research is based on the company’s newest reasoning technology, OpenAI o3.

The post OpenAI Unveils New A.I. Agent for Research appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Research has found that libraries make everything better. ‹

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:36:55 +0000

January 28, 2025, 11:23am

Science has backed up what many of us have long been saying: the library rocks. A study from the New York Public Library surveyed 1,974 users on how the library makes them feel and how it affects their lives, and the results are overwhelmingly positive.

The researchers’ analysis (which used positive psychology’s PERMA model, if that means anything to you) discovered that libraries are good for people, their well-being, and their communities. Not only that, but the positive societal impacts are more pronounced in lower-income communities, even more reason to make sure we’re funding and supporting libraries. Don’t let the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher tell you otherwise, government can help people!

Some top-line statistics from the study:

– 92% of respondents reported feeling somewhat to very “calm / peaceful” after visiting the Library
– 74% of respondents reported that their library use positively affects how equipped they feel to cope with the world
– 90% of respondents reported that their Library use positively affects how much they love to learn new things
– 88% of respondents reported that their Library use has supported their personal growth

Those are some big numbers and some uniformly good news — people are not only feeling better about themselves and their world after a visit to the library, but they’re feeling more secure in their world too.

The individual outcomes are undeniable: 89% of respondents said that the library had a positive effect on them having “more appreciation for things [they] did not know much about before” and 77% said the library made them feel “that what [they] do in [their] life is valuable and worthwhile.” You can get books at the library, but you can also fight your existential dread.

People are also moving away from doomerism in the stacks: 82% of visitors said use of the library “positively affects how optimistic they are about the future.” That’s not just for people visiting the brick-and-mortar library either: 58% of e-only users also get a sense of optimism from library interactions. It honestly feels like a miracle that anything connected to the internet would make people feel good, so this is a big win.

The community feelings the library engenders are very encouraging too: 75% say libraries gave them more positive feelings of “empathy towards others who may be different from [them],” 72% said it made them feel more connected to others, 66% felt “seen and heard,” and 70% felt like they are “part of a community.” Most touching to me is that 59% said the library had a positive effect on their “feeling that there are people in your life who really care about [them].”

What I find most charming in this study are the quotes, which the researchers highlight in “Patron Voices” sections. They’re full of great little lines, like people calling the library “a touchstone” and “a place to rely on,” and that “knowing it’s there makes me feel better about my life in the city.”

I really had to hold myself back from including too many of these patron quotes, because in a month when I’ve been feeling so, so down, reading all the nice things people have to say about the library felt like a hug from an old friend. Here are just some of them:

– “Space where I can just be me”
– “Books transport me”
– “Islands of calm, and I find balance within them”
– “It offers us hope that we can do something, that we can make a change, that we can advance”
– “Surrounded me with life’s possibilities”
– “Makes me feel useful”
– “The library gives you a sense of direction”

Tell me you didn’t tear up at that, and pal, I’ll show you a liar. Also these quotes are a great opportunity for some uplifting found poetry, if anyone’s looking for a new chapbook project.

So the takeaway? If you’re feeling unmotivated and unconnected, the library has now been scientifically proven to improve your well-being, the perfect antidote to all the push alerts and doomscrolling that’s bringing you down.

Like this:

Like Loading…

The post Research has found that libraries make everything better. ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

An explosive new Anne Frank book has been put on pause after its research was called into question. ‹ LiteraryHub

admin — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 02:35:33 +0000

February 2, 2022, 11:37am

Ambo Anthos, the Dutch publisher of Rosemary Sullivan’s The Betrayal of Anne Frank, has indefinitely suspended printing of the book after central elements of research were called into question. The book’s thesis—that the Frank family’s location was leaked to the Nazis by Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary—has been criticized as lacking evidence by, among others, the Anne Frank Fund.

In an email to its authors, Ambo Anthos wrote that it should have taken a more “critical stance” on the book. “We await the answers from the researchers to the questions that have arisen and are delaying the decision to print another run,” read the email in part, according to Reuters and The New York Times. “We offer our sincere apologies to anyone who might feel offended by the book.”

According to The New York Times, The Betrayal of Anne Frank argues that van den Bergh had access to a list of Amsterdam Jews in hiding, compiled by the Jewish Council; Apparently, the investigators produced no evidence of this list ever existed, and no scholar of the Jewish Council knows of such a list. In an earlier New York Times interview, media producer Pieter Pieter van Twisk, whose company Proditione led the attempt to identify who betrayed Anne Frank, told The Times there was “circumstantial evidence” of the list’s existence—but the three sources whose testimony he cited were all Nazi collaborators.

WWII historian Bart van der Boom told the Times this insinuation that the Jewish Council kept a list of Jews in hiding is “totally unfounded, and worse, very, very unlikely. It’s almost unthinkable.”

Van Twisk told Reuters the book’s research team was “completely surprised” by Ambo Anthos’s choice: “We had a meeting last week with the editors and talked about the criticism and why we felt it could be deflected and agreed we would come with a detailed reaction later.”

“Simply to disseminate an assertion that then in the public discussion becomes a kind of fact borders on a conspiracy theory,” John Goldsmith, president of the Anne Frank Fund, told Reuters. “Now the main statement is: a Jew betrayed Jews. That stays in the memory and it is unsettling.”

HarperCollins, The Betrayal of Anne Frank’s US publisher, has made no public statement about the book.

Like this:

Like Loading…

The post An explosive new Anne Frank book has been put on pause after its research was called into question. ‹ LiteraryHub appeared first on Our Story Insight.