"“Big Tech has played this game really successfully in the past decade,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who previously founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society without raising money outside the university. “The number of academics who have been paid by Facebook alone is extraordinary.”
Most tech-focused academics say their work is not influenced by the companies, and the journals that publish their studies have ethics rules designed to ward off egregious interference. But in interviews, two dozen professors said that by controlling funding and access to data, tech companies wield “soft power,” slowing down research, sparking tension between academics and their institutions, and shifting the fields’ targets in small — but potentially transformative — ways...
Harvard’s Lessig, who spent years heading a center on ethics issues in society at the university, is developing a system for academics to verify that their research is truly independent. He hopes to present the initiative, the Academic Integrity Project, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is still looking for funding."
