After years of contentious relationships with academic researchers, Meta is opening a small pilot program that will allow a few of them access to Instagram data for up to six months or so to study the app's impact on the well-being of teens and young adults. young adults. 
The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on specific areas of research – exploring, for example, whether social media use is associated with different outcomes in different regions of the world – and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions.
Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants.
Meta said certain types of data will be excluded, such as user demographic information and media content that users post.
A full list of eligible data will be released soon, and it's not yet clear whether internal information related to ads served to users or Instagram's content sorting algorithm, for example, will be given.
The program is run in partnership with the Center for Open Science, or COS, a non-profit organization. The researchers, not Meta, will be responsible for recruiting the adolescents and must obtain parental consent and, of course, privacy precautions.
