Hobbs, William R.
Burke, Moira K.
Article History
Received: 17 August 2016
Accepted: 13 March 2017
First Online: 24 April 2017
Competing interests
: W.H. was a Facebook research intern in 2013. M.B. is a Facebook employee. W.H. prepared the research protocol prior to his internship; Facebook then provided data access to W.H. to conduct the study as an intern. Facebook did not place any restrictions on the design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript, beyond the requirement that this work was to be done in compliance with its data policy and that the prepared manuscript was subject to internal research review to not release proprietary information. During the study protocol’s review by the California Department of Public Health, Facebook submitted a letter stating that it would not attempt to influence the scientific interpretation of the results and would not prohibit the publication of the results owing to their scientific content.