The Federal Trade Commission this week slammed Facebook for blaming a ban on New York University researchers on a 2019 deal Facebook struck with the FTC to protect user privacy.
The agency on Thursday sent a letter to the company denouncing the social network’s decision to suspend Facebook accounts belonging to researchers at the NYU Ad Observatory, who were studying the social network’s political ad practices.
“The FTC is committed to protecting the privacy of people, and efforts to shield targeted advertising practices from scrutiny run counter to that mission,” wrote Samuel Levine, the commission’s Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
The NYU Ad Observatory has been working to catalog how organizations, such as political action committees and so-called “dark money groups,” can use Facebook’s political ads and misinformation to influence US elections. However, Facebook contends the researchers have been scraping users’ personal information from the social network, a violation of the company’s terms of service.
Facebook initially said the ban was necessary, in part, because of the $5 billion deal the company reached with the FTC in 2019 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order,” the company said earlier this week.
Insinuations that the ban was required under the FTC deal are “inaccurate,” Levine wrote this week. “While I appreciate that Facebook has now corrected the record, I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter.”
Levine also pointed out the FTC never received a notice from Facebook ahead of time that the company would be “publicly invoking” the order to justify terminating the academic research. “Had you honored your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest,” he added.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it doesn’t appear the FTC plans to force the company to lift the ban.
“While it is not our role to resolve individual disputes between Facebook and third parties, we hope that the company is not invoking privacy—much less the FTC consent order—as a pretext to advance other aims,” he wrote, noting the FTC “supports efforts to shed light on opaque business practices, especially around surveillance-based advertising.”
In the meantime, one of the NYU researchers is calling on the social network to reinstate the accounts, citing the FTC’s letter to the company. “We hope to put this incident behind us and return to our work fighting disinformation online,” tweeted Laura Edelson, a PhD candidate at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
