I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but could Meta actually bully/bribe Stanford to change the figures?

Asking questions about who’s paying for the study isn’t being a conspiracy theorist. Especially Meta, they’re evil af. They seem to be cautious as well.

This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez- Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collab- oration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published. More details of this partnership are in Appendices E and F. We have posted answers to frequently asked questions online at this website.