Heaven forbid someone lifts the lid on social network’s disinformation and public manipulation
Facebook, which has repeatedly touted its transparency efforts, on Tuesday disabled the accounts of independent ad transparency researchers. The targeted ad biz said it did so in the name of privacy, a source of persistent scandal for the corporation. Facebook said it disabled the accounts, apps, Pages, and platform access for NYU’s Ad Observatory Project and participating researchers because their work violated its rules. „NYU’s Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our Terms of Service,“ said Mike Clark, product management director at Facebook, in a blog post. Clark said Facebook did so to comply with the terms of its FTC Order, which followed from the company’s 2019 settlement with the US trade watchdog to resolve privacy complaints. And he said Facebook told the researchers their tool would violate the social network’s terms a year ago, before it launched. The NYU Ad Observatory created a browser extension called Ad Observer that scrapes data from Facebook in a way that avoids the tech giant’s detection systems, said Clark, claiming some of that data was not publicly viewable on the site. „Today’s action doesn’t change our commitment to providing more transparency around ads on Facebook or our ongoing collaborations with academia,“ Clark insisted. The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a phone interview with The Register, Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher and former Federal Trade Commission technologist, dismissed Facebook’s justification and the idea that the consent decree requires such drastic action. „It’s selective enforcement,“ he said, noting that Facebook often permits other analytics tools on their websites. „Yet again Facebook is trying to use privacy to fulfill a policy goal of reducing transparency around ad serving.“ The reason Facebook would do so, he said, is that the company has faced a lot of criticism around how it targets ads, and not just political ads, which the NYU researchers are studying.
