CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg walks to lunch following a session at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 08, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
Advertisement
Advertisement
While the shutdown was unexpected, Facebook’s ire about a tool the researchers created dates back over a year.The tool is a browser extension called Ad Observer, which users voluntarily download. Users give the extension access to their personal Facebook pages in order to collect anonymized data about the ads they’re seeing. That information then goes into a public database, where journalists and researchers can see how and where politicians are focusing their ad spend.
Facebook felt Ad Observer was a breach of users’ privacy and issued the researchers a warning in a meeting last summer, before the tool was even launched. In October, two weeks before the presidential election, Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter, giving them 45 days to shut it down.
That deadline passed at the end of November, and at the time it looked like Facebook had relented and allowed the tool to remain in place. The media coverage of Facebook’s letter had also been a boon for the project: the number of people who consented to share their data via Ad Observer doubled to over 16,000 people in the space of a few weeks.
Advertisement
“There is, of course, no requirement that Facebook prohibit independent accountability research and journalism in its terms,” Mayer tweeted. “This is a classic blame-the-regulator dodge.”And as Axel Burns, a social media researcher at Queensland University of Technology pointed out on Twitter, “this research is necessary, of course, because the tools Facebook provides are so inadequate — the Ad Library is severely limited and (as a single point of data access operated by Facebook) can't be trusted or verified to provide all the relevant data.”
Advertisement