Russell Group universities face criticism after receiving £2.8m in funding from Meta last year

Top universities in the UK have come under fire for receiving millions of pounds in funding from Meta in 2024, with campaigners criticising Meta’s political influence and lack of regulations on harmful content. 

Children’s rights activists and charities are calling for universities to begin to divest from Meta. Meta has been criticised for failing to adequately protect young people from viewing harmful content, including self-harm and suicide methods.  

Beeban Kidron, a children’s rights activist, told The Guardian that this is “just one strand of a deliberate system of lobbying”. Some have expressed concern that academics accepting funding from large companies like Meta are in the pockets of such corporations, and that this relationship could harm the research that they conduct.  

Oxford University received over £1.8m in the last four years from the tech giant. A university spokesperson reassured critics that the correct guidelines were followed to ensure that the funding aligned with their values of good academic practice

Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, warned that “large corporations can sometimes see funding academic research as a way to generate a veneer of legitimacy for aspects of their activity [seen as harmful]”.  

Oxford University received over £1.8m in the last four years from the tech giant. A university spokesperson reassured critics that the correct guidelines were followed to ensure that the funding aligned with their values of good academic practice.  

They confirmed that the money was used to fund research into large language models, a type of machine learning model which aims to generate human language.  

Meta has been at the heart of various controversies. The most notable of these was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It was found that Facebook had provided personal data of millions of users to inform Cambridge Analytica’s political advertising. Concerns had been raised that this data harvesting could have impacted the 2016 Brexit referendum, although official investigations concluded that “no significant breaches” occurred. 

However, others suggest that funding from Meta can have some benefits for academics. Former PhD student Abhinav Shukla at Imperial College, a university which received £3.6m since 2021, noted that funding from corporations is often a recruitment tool. He also said that receiving funding from Meta helped him obtain a job in a relevant field after university.