This blogpost is a detailed background statement to this comment published in Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00828-5 . Fast-Read The following text argues that the Social Science One initiative that is celebrated by Facebook as success is an systemic failure. Privacy concerns are instrumentalized to withhold data from independent researchers while similar data is still available to private companies. The hurdles for researchers at Social Science One are set in a way that it is nearly impossible to study the effect of social media on elections and democracy. This fits to the strategic interest of Facebook to play cooperative but to control the outcomes of research. Social Science One is structured in a way that it is easy for Facebook to instrumentalize this organization. We end with policy recommendations. An appendix shows that the dataset delivered by Facebook is more or less useless. Background Facebook has announced the release of a dataset that is shar...