Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quietly cracking open his company's vast trove of user data for a study on economic inequality in the U.S. — the latest sign of his efforts to reckon with divisions in American society that the social network is accused of making worse.

The study, which hasn't previously been reported, is mining the social connections among Facebook’s American users to shed light on the growing income disparity in the U.S., where the top 1 percent of households is said to control 40 percent of the country's wealth. Facebook is an incomparably rich source of information for that kind of research: By one estimate, about three of five American adults use the social network.


Now the company is making the user data available to a team led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty, a favorite among tech elites for his focus on data-driven solutions to the nation's social and economic problems. Venture capitalist J.D. Vance praised Chetty by name in his 2016 guide to Trump country, “Hillbilly Elegy,” saying his work shows how "a poor kid’s chances of rising through the ranks of America’s meritocracy were lower than most of us wanted."

Facebook and Chetty declined to talk about the full scope of the research, but veterans of Washington's domestic policy debates say the social network's involvement could turbo-charge efforts to map out how geography and social connections play into economic inequality.

“For a policy nerd like me, being able to see that quantifiable evidence about things lots of us have been debating in theory for a long time is absolutely huge,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who led the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House. “The notion that you can use data about people’s social interactions and begin to piece together, ‘OK, what is social isolation actually costing us?’ is a whole other ballgame.”

The new research is the latest sign of Zuckerberg’s effort to grapple with the aftershocks of the 2016 election. Facebook has been widely criticized for acting as both a political echo chamber and conduit for Russian propaganda during the campaign, much of it focused on damaging the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — allegations laid out once again in Friday’s federal indictment of Russian individuals and organizations.

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Since the election, Zuckerberg has announced a series of changes to the Facebook new feed, trying to move users from passively consuming viral stories to actively engaging with friends and family.

At the same time, the billionaire Facebook CEO has shown growing interest in the concerns of everyday Americans, including the economic anxieties that fueled the rise of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race. He's embarked on a well-documented national tour to meet Americans from all 50 states, saying he wants to "get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future."

Zuckerberg expressed concern about the country's skewed economic playing field during a May commencement speech at Harvard University, lamenting that “we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots." Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, said the U.S. should explore the idea of a universal basic income, in which Americans would get a guaranteed sum of money from the government to cover living expenses.

Facebook confirmed the broad contours of its partnership with Chetty but declined to elaborate on the substance of the study. Chetty, in a brief interview following a January speech in Washington, said he and his collaborators — who include researchers from Stanford and New York University — have been working on the inequality study for at least six months.

"We're using social networks, and measuring interactions there, to understand the role of social capital much better than we've been able to," he said.

Researchers say they see Facebook's enormous cache of data as a remarkable resource, offering an unprecedentedly detailed and sweeping look at American society. That store of information contains both details that a user might tell Facebook — their age, hometown, schooling, family relationships — and insights that the company has picked up along the way, such as the interest groups they’ve joined and geographic distribution of who they call a "friend."

It’s all the more significant, researchers say, when you consider that Facebook’s user base — about 239 million monthly users in the U.S. and Canada at last count — cuts across just about every demographic group.

And all that information, say researchers, lets them take guesses about users’ wealth. Facebook itself recently patented a way of figuring out someone’s socioeconomic status using factors ranging from their stated hobbies to how many internet-connected devices they own.

A Facebook spokesman addressed the potential privacy implications of the study's access to user data, saying, "We conduct research at Facebook responsibly, which includes making sure we protect people’s information." The spokesman added that Facebook follows an "enhanced" review process for research projects, adopted in 2014 after a controversy over a study that manipulated some people's news feeds to see if it made them happier or sadder.

According to a Stanford University source familiar with Chetty's study, the Facebook account data used in the research has been stripped of any details that could be used to identify users. The source added that academics involved in the study have gone through security screenings that include background checks, and can access the Facebook data only in secure facilities.

Muñoz said it makes her nervous that Facebook can hand out that much data to researchers, but said she's reassured it's in Chetty's hands. She said the professor “had a lot of fans” in the Obama White House, who admired his work using Internal Revenue Service tax records to show how Americans’ hometowns strongly predict their future wealth.

Chetty, who won a MacArthur genius grant in 2012, is known for his academic research on “the fading American dream."

Chetty has previously shown an interest in tapping the "big data" held by Facebook. During a 2016 Stanford conference co-hosted by the Obama White House and Zuckerberg's philanthropic foundation, Chetty said he'd like to use Facebook data to figure out “whether you can network yourself out of poverty.” On an economics podcast last May, he argued that “social network data gives us the most precise lens to look at how people are connected and how that might influence their long-term outcomes.”

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has increasingly focused on the theme of economic mobility.

In a Facebook post last year after a stop in Wilton, Iowa, part of his national tour, Zuckerberg talked about "a real divergence between opportunity available in small towns and big cities,” pointing people interested in the subject to Chetty's research. Economic opportunity has also been a core focus of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic group founded by the CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

“Raj Chetty is doing unbelievably good work,” said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” is oft-cited for its examination of the value of social relationships. “Mostly, it’s because he’s been able to get access to data that nobody else was able to get access to.“