Facebook says it has disabled the accounts, apps, Pages, and access to its APIs for researchers running NYU's Ad Observatory Project, citing TOS violations
- Company says researchers of political ads were scraping data — NYU's Ad Observatory got cease-and-desist letter last October Source: About Facebook .
The cutoff lands amid an already fraught relationship between platforms and academic researchers, while Mozilla has separately challenged Facebook’s stated rationale for the action in its analysis of the research-access shutdown.
First-order effects
NYU’s Ad Observatory Project loses the Facebook access points it used for its research, interrupting its ability to collect and analyze political-ad targeting data through those accounts and tools.
Facebook enforces its terms-of-service boundary against a prominent outside research project and retains control over the platform data available to it.
Second-order effects
Academic groups studying Facebook advertising face a clearer operational risk: research methods dependent on browser-collected or platform-linked data can be cut off when Facebook deems them noncompliant.
The shutdown gives added force to calls for ad-tech oversight, as reflected in the related coverage arguing that the action should spur broader regulation of the ad-tech industry.
Third-order effects
If platforms continue to set and enforce the terms for access to data needed for independent scrutiny, transparency research will increasingly depend on formal access rules rather than researcher-built collection tools.
The dispute is a test case for whether political-ad accountability can rely on voluntary platform access or requires an external regulatory framework.
The trend: Political-ad transparency is becoming a contest over platform-controlled data access, with academic research increasingly colliding with private terms-of-service enforcement.
This evening, Facebook suspended my Facebook account and the accounts of several people associated with Cybersecurity for Democracy, our team at NYU. This has the effect of cutting off our access to Facebook's Ad Library data, as well as Crowdtangle. 1/4
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, 3/4
Facebook has dismantled the accounts and apparatus of NYU researchers who were running a project looking at how political ads on the platform are targeted at users. This in order to “stop unauthorized scraping and protect people's privacy”, it says. https://about.fb.com/...
I'm truly surprised that Facebook thinks it's in their interest to promote this as data collection on non-consenting users. That immediately evokes Cambridge Analytica. At least, it did for me when they told me that. This is so not that. You'd think they'd want to make it clear.
Facebook tried to use the same argument with me when I wrote this deep dive on the NYU standoff, saying vaguely the NYU team was collecting data without people's consent. When I got to the bottom of it, I found out those people were actually advertisers. https://www.protocol.com/…
NEW: Facebook says it has disabled accounts and severed API access for a group of NYU researchers running the Ad Observatory project. FB sent the same group a cease and desist letter in Oct. The researchers are studying political ad targeting on FB https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Facebook has cut off access to Facebook to the lead researcher on Facebook political ads. Because it can. It used the argument that it doesn't want another Cambridge Analytica which is blood boiling given total lack of accountability& consequences for FB's role in that https://tw…
including our work measuring vaccine misinformation with the Virality Project and many other partners who rely on our data. The work our team does to make data about disinformation on Facebook transparent is vital to a healthy internet and a healthy democracy. 4/4
Keep this in mind the next time Facebook pats itself on the back for giving a few couch-cushion nickels to some journalism organizations https://twitter.com/...
This is incredibly rich coming from the company that published a paper in 2016 absolving themselves of any ethical wrongdoing for their unregulated psychological research. https://twitter.com/...
We need to know what social media companies are doing and where they are leaving the back door open to nefarious actors. They are becoming increasingly resistant to any sort of scrutiny or forensic analysis. Does @facebookapp have an explanation for this latest? https://twitter.c…
Y'all. Broken record here. Journalists, please pls don't share Facebook's blog post. Report with proper context. The post is misleading as hell and you're only amplifying it. Even if you don't have a report, it's better to link to a competitive newsroom. Don't link to Facebook.🙏🏽…
The bizarre thing about this story last year was the academics loudly pronouncing that they have ethics and standards boards, so how dare Facebook suggest it's a bad idea to scrape whatever private, unconsented data they want, as though Cambridge Analytica never happened. https:/…
FB says the research group is “scraping” data, which is against the terms of service. Researchers are looking at how political ads are targeted to people on FB using a browser extension people can download
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. 2/4
Pro: reduces risk of another Cambridge Analytica situation Con: These researchers set up good privacy safeguards and were doing valuable work in the public interest that Facebook likely will not https://twitter.com/...
@RMac18 Super good point. I'm not retweeting as I don't want to give their blog post amplification but that's exactly the type of context reports need. Thanks. https://twitter.com/...
Mark Zuckerberg is the very real, very evil, genocide profiteering version of the snake oil salesman behind the curtain in Oz. And he HATES it when anybody peeks under its tattered velvet cloth https://twitter.com/...
@RMac18 As we've explained to you in the past, this isn't true. We banned Clearview's founder from our platform and issued a C&D demanding they stop accessing any data, photos or videos from our services.
Outrageous: Facebook is shutting down NYU's independent advertising accountability research, on the pretext that the Federal Trade Commission requires that step. Part of a long-running pattern of obstructing academic research and investigative journalism. https://about.fb.com/...
Facebook gets to define what “privacy” means in the context of punishing the NYU Political Ad Observatory, concentrating corporate power. It signals to other academics that Facebook shamelessly now wears Cambridge Analytica as a fig leaf.
🚨🚨🚨 So Facebook has just lit a massive nuke under independent scholarly attempts (at @nyuniversity) to hold its dodgy ad targeting practices to account - and its justification is full of the usual fulsome, self-serving, deeply misleading tropes. https://about.fb.com/...
My *favorite* part of Facebook's blog post about shutting down access to an outside research project is the way they capitalize and refer to their Terms of Service, as if the Terms are sacred texts and that the wrongness of “violating” them requires no explanation. How could you!…
Interesting to see who Facebook tries to go after for scraping its data (an NYU project studying political ads) and who it doesn't (Clearview AI) https://about.fb.com/...