Elite UK universities continue to benefit from millions of pounds of funding from Facebook owner Meta.
Members of the Russell Group have benefited from £2.8 million worth of funds from last year’s meta, and £7.7 million over the past four years. Imperial College alone has won £3.6 million from Mark Zuckerberg’s company since 2021.
The funds range from donations classified as “charitable gifts” to formal research partnerships on projects at Imperial, such as “Listen: In-ear Surveillance of Physiological Responses” and “Cross-modal Learning of Emotions.”
The figures, released after the request for freedom of information, prompted calls from online safety campaigners to help universities take a more cautious approach to engaging with the meta.
The subject of taking funding from META has also become a live issue for the academic community, and researchers who have previously benefited from funding have since expressed their personal regret for doing so.
Beavan Kidron, a leading critic of major technology companies and advocate for children’s rights online, said: “University technology funding is just one of the intentional systems of lobbying. Individual scholars and think tanks should show not just where their funds come from, but what percentage they are, so they can take into account the context in which they work.”
Imperial appears to have been the biggest beneficiary, but others include Oxford University, which has accepted £1.8 million over the past four years. Oxford’s funds have been directed towards projects such as research into improving large-scale language models (LLMS), a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human language.
Oxford said it followed “robust and strict guidelines” to ensure that acceptance of funds does not undermine academic freedom or academic integrity.
A spokesman for Russell Group said: “Our universities regularly collaborate with global businesses in many fields, and these relationships support research and innovation activities, promote valuable international connections, and benefit the UK economy and community.
“All our universities implement thorough due diligence on charitable contributions and external R&D funding to fully comply with the university’s policies and UK regulations.”
Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, said Meta and Facebook have funded academic research in a variety of ways in recent years, ranging from ad-hoc “unlimited gifts” to conditional, conditional data access plans.
He said the company funded a 2020 US election survey, but without Facebook making this completely clear to the researchers involved, there were accusations that it had changed its news feed algorithm during the experiment, damaging some of the research’s key findings.
“We know from the past that large companies can sometimes see academic research in funding as a way to generate a veneer of legitimacy for aspects of activities that public and policy makers consider to be harmful.
Some universities either refused to provide funding details or only partially did it. Bristol University said disclosures and donation amounts of donations from companies that made the donation “will undermine trust in the university and prevent these companies and future donors from making contributions to the university in the future.”
Abhinav Shukla, a former PhD student at Imperial, was a doctoral student who had access to Meta data as part of his research, and insisted on collaboration between the company and the university.
“It’s their recruitment tool. They fund some research and if it works, it’s not like Meta patents or hides it. But if there’s a direct application to meta products, they try to hire someone with that specific expertise.
“From a student’s perspective, it turns out to be pretty good, especially for me, because it helped me get the job I really wanted to do from my PhD. It helped me work in a region where I could apply directly to my product.”
Meta was approached for comments.