US Senator Mark Warner said on Wednesday that Facebook’s move to disable the accounts of a group of New York University researchers who were studying political ads on its platform was “deeply concerning”. Researchers from NYU, who were studying political ads on the site because of concerns about the privacy of other users.
Warner, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the action was a step back. “This latest action by Facebook To cut down on transparency efforts by an outside group – efforts that have repeatedly facilitated the disclosure of ads that violate Facebook’s terms of service, ads for fraudulent and violent financial schemes, and political ads that have been shown to be vulnerable to Facebook’s The ad was inappropriately removed from the library – seriously concerning,” she said in a statement.
Warner said Congress must take action to combat fraud and misconduct in online advertising. Facebook defended the action on Wednesday, saying: “We have repeatedly explained our privacy concerns to NYU, but their researchers ultimately chose not to address them and instead began scraping people’s data and ads from our platform.” Done,” a spokesperson said.
The NYU Advertising Observatory project, which received a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook last year, asks people to download a browser extension that collects information about how political ads are shown to them on the site. Facebook has built tools to improve transparency of advertising on its services, including its own ad library, a searchable online database showing political ads on its site. But researchers have criticized the library for being incomplete and difficult to use.
This evening, Facebook suspended my Facebook account and the accounts of several people associated with our team at Cyber Security for Democracy, NYU. This has the effect of cutting off our access to Facebook’s ad library data as well as CrowdTangle. 1/4- Laura Adelson (@lauraedelson2) 4 August 2021
NYU researcher Laura Adelson said in a series of tweets Tuesday that Facebook’s actions blocked her access to tools used to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook ad library and identify misinformation in political ads. That included many sowing distrust in the American electoral system. “By suspending our accounts, Facebook has effectively put an end to all this work,” she said.
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