Facebook sparks fresh controversy by cutting off research on political ads

Facebook sparked a fresh controversy after itcut off some academic researchers for "scraping" data from the platform for investigatingthe misinformation spread through political ads on the social network.

The California tech giantsays the New York University researchers violated its terms of service and were involved in unauthorised data collection from its massive network.

The academics, however, say the company is attempting to exert control on research that paints it in a negative light.

The NYU researchers with the Ad Observatory Project had for several years been looking into Facebook’s Ad Library, where searches can be done on advertisements running across Facebook’s products.

Facebookproduct management director Mike Clark said the accounts from the project were disabled "to stop unauthorised scraping and protect people's privacy in line with our privacy program."

The access was used to “uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, to identify misinformation in political ads, including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook’s apparent amplification of partisan misinformation,” said Laura Edelson, the lead researcher behind NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy.

The NYU project had been at loggerheads for months withFacebookover the program, which used a browser tool to collect data on ads spreading political hoaxes, violence, and COVID-19 misinformation.

"Research cannot be the justification for compromising people's privacy," Clark said in a blog post, arguing that the researchers were collecting user names, ads, and links to user profiles even for people who did not install the browser tool or consent to the collection.

But theFacebookmove prompted an angry response from researchers and free-speech activists who argued the social network is blocking independent access to its internal tools.

"By suspending our accounts,Facebookhas tried to shut down all this work.Facebookhas also effectively cut off access to more than two dozen other researchers and journalists who get access toFacebookdata through our project, including our work measuring vaccine misinformation," Edelson added.

Facebook says it makes information on political ads available through its Ad Library and provides “privacy-protected data sets” to researchers through other means.

The row marked the latest clash forFacebook, which has sought to clamp down on third parties with access to private user data while at the same seeking to enable outside researchers to study its inner workings.

Facebookclaims it took the action in compliance with a 2019 settlement with US regulators on user privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data was scraped for political ad targeting.

But critics saidFacebookneeds more transparency.

"We can't allowFacebookto decide what the public gets to know aboutFacebook. Independent research that respects user privacy is absolutely crucial right now," said Alex Abdo of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

"It's essential to figuring out how disinformation spreads on the platform, how advertisers exploitFacebook's micro-targeting tools, and howFacebook's system of amplification may be pushing us further apart."

Matt Bailey of the writers' free expression group PEN America said the action "is part of a larger pattern ofFacebookseeking to undercut or silence anyone analyzing the platforms' practices from the outside.

(With inputs from agencies)