Facebook reportedly disabled the accounts of New York University researchers affiliated with the NYU Ad Observatory, which collected and revealed information related to political advertisements on the social network, for violating its terms of service.
Facebook also removed the researchers’ access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) and “disabled other apps and Pages associated with the research project,” Bloomberg reports. The problem appears to stem from an Observatory browser extension called Ad Observer that, according to Facebook, “collected data about Facebook users who did not install or consent to the collection.”
The NYU researchers say on Ad Observer’s website that the extension was designed to gather information about Facebook and YouTube ads to assist efforts to hold the companies behind them accountable. The NYU Ad Observatory says the extension doesn’t collect “anything personally identifying” about its users. Ad Observer was instead supposed to collect the following information about the ads themselves:
- The advertiser’s name and disclosure string.
- The ad’s text, image, and link.
- The information Facebook provides about how the ad was targeted.
- When the ad was shown to you.
- Your browser language.
The banned researchers gathered that data to determine who funds US political ad spending, the objective of those ads, how those organizations promote their messages, and who their ads target. They say on the Ad Observer website that they “think it’s important to democracy to be able to check who is trying to influence the public and how.” But that requires more information than Facebook offers.
“Over the last several years, we’ve used this access to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, identify misinformation in political ads including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook’s apparent amplification of partisan misinformation,” tweeted Laura Edelson, a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.
“By suspending our accounts, Facebook has effectively ended all this work. Facebook has also effectively cut off access to more than two dozen other researchers and journalists who get access to Facebook data through our project,” she adds. “The work our team does to make data about disinformation on Facebook transparent is vital to a healthy internet and a healthy democracy.”
Facebook says it had to ban these researchers and remove their access to its platform because of FTC policies enacted in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to The Verge. But it’s not clear how giving people the ability to share the ads they see with researchers is the same as the systematic abuse of Facebook’s policies and misleading claims about how collected data would be used. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
