Facebook's decision to crack down on NYU's Ad Observer highlights the increasingly fraught dynamic between tech companies and academics
Laura Edelson was in a state of panic, and I knew I was a little bit to blame for her freakout. — “If this is true,” Edelson told me this week during … Tweets: @issielapowsky , @jcstearns , @justinhendrix , @farkasjohan , @mikarv , @antoniocasilli , @bostonjoan , @seamushughes , @jason_kint , @shannimcg , @janiswong_ , @funnymonkey , @trialbytruth , @alexanderabdo , @therriaultphd , @blackamazon , @issielapowsky , @issielapowsky , @typewriters , @timgrieve , @jacob_montg , @lauraedelson2 , @issielapowsky , @issielapowsky , @shannimcg , @2ramyakrishnan , @mmasnick , and @mmasnick Tweets: Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : NEW: Facebook's attempt to shutter research at NYU on political ads is just the most extreme example of the increasingly fraught relationship between platforms and academics. My #longreads on how tech giants both court and crush the people who study them https://www.protocol.com/... Josh Stearns / @jcstearns : This is an important and deeply reported piece. https://twitter.com/... Justin Hendrix / @justinhendrix : Platforms vs. PhDs: How tech giants court and crush the people who study them- @issielapowsky is writing some of the most important coverage on the tech platforms these days. Smart folks including @LauraEdelson2, @TaliaStroud & @j_a_tucker discussed here: https://www.protocol.com/... Johan Farkas / @farkasjohan : Proud that our latest work is mentioned here: “In another analysis of research on hate speech, racism and social media, researchers found Twitter data appeared in more than half of the papers they studied, while YouTube data appeared in just under 9%” https://www.protocol.com/... Michael Veale / @mikarv : A reminder that Facebook is currently engaging in legal threats and the shadow of a vicious litigation against NYU and specific PhD candidates there to try to silence researchers studying its advertising targeting system beyond the questions and parameters it wants to control. https://twitter.com/... Casilli / @antoniocasilli : This is an important inquiry into social media abuse and intimidation of academics through arbitrary rules on data access. This is also a grossly mistitled article (not the author's fault) because it sounds like an essay on how Big Tech hire and crush idealistic PhDs (also true). https://twitter.com/... Joan Donovan, PhD / @bostonjoan : Facebook has some in this field on full tilt, but sometimes, you shouldn't show your hand until the dealer lays down the river. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Seamus Hughes / @seamushughes : “Last spring, in a case called Sandvig v. Barr, a federal court ruled that researchers who use fake job profiles to study algorithmic discrimination in violation of companies' terms of service wouldn't be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act” https://www.protocol.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : They're really doing outstanding work here. It continues to be ironic how Facebook can collect a majority of its data from other services when users aren't even interacting with it yet not more aggressively make this data available for the NYU research team. https://twitter.com/... Shannon McGregor, PhD / @shannimcg : @issielapowsky By & large, researchers from less well-resourced institutions do not have the capacity to create & maintain even imperfect tools. So on top of the myriad of challenges described, there are serious issues of inequity when it comes to *who* can research these platforms 2/ Janis Wong / @janiswong_ : Super important article and must read for researchers. If FB is not willing to make compromises, why should institutions when it comes to research, especially regarding funding? https://twitter.com/... Bill Fitzgerald / @funnymonkey : Facebook doesn't court researchers. Facebook courts sycophants and apologists, some of whom call themselves researchers. https://twitter.com/... Infospectives / @trialbytruth : @mmasnick Will delve into detail, but from EU PoV GDPR has a very explicit carve out for research, as long as activity tightly boundaried, data minimised and retention as short as possible. Unequally broad definition for them versus narrow definition for everyone else, sounds about right Alex Abdo / @alexanderabdo : Incredibly important story by @issielapowsky at @protocol, including this follow-up thread on Facebook's repeated attempts to mislead her. Independent research and journalism on the platforms is key. We can't let Facebook decide what we're allowed to know about Facebook. https://twitter.com/... Andrew Therriault / @therriaultphd : NYU, Facebook, political ad targeting, even one of my old coauthors and advisors... this story is pretty much exactly what you'd if you fed my resume into GPT-3 to generate a news article. https://twitter.com/... @blackamazon : This influences how they study , how they interact and real work is needed on directing that and reconciling that https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : While reporting, Facebook told me Ad Observer violates their terms by scraping/publishing users' data who didn't consent. That claim shocked me until I realized: the users Facebook was talking about were advertisers whose ads and Pages are already public https://www.protocol.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : I talked to @LauraEdelson2 of NYU about her legal issues with Facebook, @mark_ledwich about how the NYU case has put a chill on funding into YouTube transparency projects, @gchaslot about scraping YouTube data and @j_a_tucker about collaborating w/Facebook https://www.protocol.com/... Lauren Wagner / @typewriters : It's me! ‘FB has made a huge trove of data available to researchers through Facebook Open Research and Transparency, working with them to study the impact on the 2020 election’: Platforms vs. PhDs: How tech giants court and crush the people who study them https://www.protocol.com/... Tim Grieve / @timgrieve : Facebook is demanding an end to a research project on political advertising in part because it scrapes data on... political advertisers. https://www.protocol.com/... Jacob Montgomery / @jacob_montg : The US government has arrangements for academics to use census data, Medicaid/Medicare claims data, and more — all while preserving individual privacy. It doesn't have to be this antagonistic, and we all need answers on the role platforms are playing in our politics. https://twitter.com/... Laura Edelson / @lauraedelson2 : If you want to read about me nearly having a heart attack on Wednesday, it's here 👇 (Also, a thoughtful and well-reported story about the inherent tensions between platforms and researchers like @cyber4democracy, @j_a_tucker, @TaliaStroud, and others) https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : I'm creating a new thread to talk about this issue, because I think it's an important one. Facebook told me multiple times that Ad Observer collects and publishes data on users who hadn't consented. It was such a damning allegation, I wanted to know whose data they meant. 1/x https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : I want to stress that none of this is easy for the platforms who *have* gotten in so much trouble over protecting user data. See: Cambridge Analytica. But that had to do with exposure of private users' data, not ads Facebook is paid to make public. https://www.protocol.com/... Shannon McGregor, PhD / @shannimcg : This is a great & important article by @issielapowsky about the struggle of researching social media platforms. Lots of challenges outlined here, but I want to point out another one. These challenges are faced by researchers at very well resourced, private institutions. 1/ https://twitter.com/... Ramya Krishnan / @2ramyakrishnan : Just to be clear here: Facebook attempted to mislead a reporter, not once, but multiple times, in order to justify its effort to shut down Ad Observer—a research project that has helped exposed the mechanics of disinformation on Facebook's platform. https://twitter.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : This is a fantastic article, and highlights the somewhat fraught intersection (collision?) between demands that platforms “protect privacy” while at the same time enabling academics to study the impact of those platforms. https://twitter.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : It basically puts everyone in an impossible position. Of course, it also lets the platforms conveniently hide data they'd rather not share by saying “privacy!”
Context & Ripple Effects
This story sits at the end of a longer arc of friction between Facebook and independent researchers. As far back as 2018, Bloomberg reported that Facebook reserved the right to veto or edit papers, capped data access, and dangled research funding in its dealings with academics — so NYU's Ad Observer, a browser-based effort to collect and publish political ad data, was always operating on terrain the company considered its own.
First-order effects
- Laura Edelson and her NYU colleagues face direct legal exposure: per the relationships in play, Facebook claims Ad Observer violates its terms by scraping and publishing advertisers' data and has issued legal threats to shut the project down.
- The immediate casualty is transparency infrastructure itself — a tool built to show who is being shown what political advertising gets cut off at the point where its data collection happens.
Second-order effects
- Every other researcher studying platform behavior through unofficial collection now operates under the same threat model: Facebook demonstrated that terms-of-service enforcement, not courts or funders, is what actually ends a research project.
- Third-party institutions are forced into the referee role that platforms have vacated — the pattern later visible when [[a:969280|Mozilla found Facebook's justifications for cutting off Ad Observatory access didn't hold water]], turning civil-society audits into the main check on platform claims.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep treating their terms of service as the governing law over public-interest research, independent accountability work migrates to whatever channels platforms don't control — regulator-mandated ad libraries, statutory researcher access, or court-supervised discovery — shifting the burden from voluntary disclosure to compelled disclosure.
- The standoff points toward a structural split between platform-approved research programs like Facebook Open Research and Transparency and adversarial outside scrutiny, with academics forced to choose affiliation or independence rather than having both.
The trend: Platform terms of service are becoming the de facto permission system for academic research into Big Tech, pushing independent oversight toward regulatory compulsion.