Facebook Boots NYU Researchers Who Were Using a Browser Extension to Study Political Ads

When Facebook introduced its Ad Library in May 2018, it heralded the archive of political ads and political issue content run by advertisers as a new era of transparency, making information public such as the campaign budget associated with the ad and how many people saw it, as well as their ages, locations and genders. However, the New York University researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory beg to differ. Laura Edelson, one of the researchers on the Cybersecurity for Democracy team and a PhD candidate at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, outlined the actions Facebook took against her and several members of her team in a series of tweets late Tuesday. She wrote, “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. Over the past several years, we’ve used this access 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.” Edelson continued, “By suspending our accounts, Facebook has effectively ended all of 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, 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.” https://twitter.com/LauraEdelson2/status/1422736706554433538 Facebook responded with a Newsroom post by product management director Mike Clark, in which he wrote, “For months, we’ve attempted to work with NYU to provide three of their researchers the precise access they’ve asked for in a privacy protected way. Today, we disabled the accounts, applications, pages and platform access associated with NYU’s Ad Observatory project and its operators after our repeated attempts to bring their research into compliance with our terms. 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. We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order.” The FTC order Clark is referring to was the Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The NYU Tandon School of Engineering kicked off the NYU Ad Observatory last September, recruiting more than 6,500 volunteers to use the Ad Observer browser extension in order to collect data on political ads served to them on Facebook. The aim was to make it easier for people such as journalists, policy makers and researchers to search political ads by specific election and state. The browser extension also collected information that was not otherwise publicly available, such as information on why users saw particular ads, user names and links to user profiles. The social network sent the NYU researchers a cease-and-desist letter last October, demanding that they stop collecting targeting data from Facebook political ads. Clark addressed the plug-in in his Newsroom post, writing, “The researchers gathered data by creating a browser extension that was programmed to evade our detection systems and scrape data such as user names, ads, links to user profiles and ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ information, some of which is not publicly-viewable on Facebook. The extension also collected data about Facebook users who did not install it or consent to the collection. The researchers had previously archived this information in a now offline, publicly available database.” He added that Facebook offered the researchers from NYU, along with others, access to ad targeting data from the 2020 U.S. presidential elections through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency platform, but they declined. The non-Facebook-affiliated group that bills itself as the Real Facebook Oversight Board reacted harshly to the news, saying in a statement, “Outside analysis of Facebook content from essential organizations like the NYU Ad Observatory are increasingly exposing Facebook as a breeding ground for disinformation and right-wing extremism. Now, like the authoritarian governments they court, Facebook is cracking down on its critics. As Facebook expands its stranglehold on the academic community studying the impacts of digital technology and social media, this is sure to have a chilling effect on other academic institutions. We can't allow it. The NYU Ad Observatory researchers are performing a critical service for democracy that must be protected.” The group of Facebook critics continued, “Facebook's action is wrong, but not surprising. And the suggestion that the NYU Ad Observatory has anything in common with Cambridge Analytica is offensive and deeply misleading. As journalists have noted, the Ad Observatory is accused of collecting data without consent, but the data collected is already public. Facebook simply wants to silence a critic. We’re outraged but not surprised, and call on Facebook to restore the Ad Observatory immediately.”