By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. is demanding that a New York University research
project cease collecting data about its political-ad targeting
practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the
platform without the company's permission.
The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched
last month by the university's engineering school that has
recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed
browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook
shows them.
In a letter sent Oct. 16 to the researchers behind the NYU Ad
Observatory, Facebook said the project violates provisions in its
terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection from its
site.
"Scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a
permissible means of collecting information from us," said the
letter, written by a Facebook privacy policy official, Allison
Hendrix. If the university doesn't end the project and delete the
data it has collected, she wrote, "you may be subject to additional
enforcement action."
The clash between the social-media giant and a major research
university comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over political
advertising on social media ahead of next month's U.S. election.
Facebook in recent weeks has said it would bar new political ads
ahead of Election Day and suspend all political ads indefinitely
that evening to prevent the spread of paid misinformation about the
election outcome.
Following a furor about the opaque nature of political
advertising in the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook launched an
archive of advertisements that run on its platform, with
information such as who paid for an ad, when it ran and the
geographic location of people who saw it. But that library excludes
information about the targeting that determines who sees the
ads.
The researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory said they wanted
to provide journalists, researchers, policy makers, and others with
the ability to search political ads by state and contest to see
what messages are targeted to specific audiences and how those ads
are funded.
Facebook's demand that the project stop its collection drew
opposition from proponents of greater ad transparency, including
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), a sponsor of a bill called the
Honest Ads Act that would mandate greater transparency in online
political advertising.
"It's unacceptable that in the middle of an election, Facebook
is making it harder for Americans to get information about online
political ads," Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement to The Wall
Street Journal. Social media platforms have pledged to make online
advertising more transparent, she said, but Facebook's threatened
action against NYU "is further evidence that voluntary standards
are insufficient."
Facebook said it already offers more transparency into political
advertising than either traditional media or rival social
platforms, and that the automated collection of data from users'
on-platform activity -- even with their permission -- poses an
unacceptable privacy threat.
"We informed NYU months ago that moving forward with a project
to scrape people's Facebook information would violate our terms,"
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said in a statement to the Journal,
adding that if the project doesn't shut down voluntarily, Facebook
could make technical changes to its own code that would block the
NYU researchers from collecting data.
For Facebook, allowing outsiders to access data on its platform
has been tricky territory. Following the uproar over Cambridge
Analytica, a company that obtained unauthorized access to Facebook
user data for political profiling in 2016, the Federal Trade
Commission pushed Facebook to rein in third-party data access.
Facebook imposed a series of restrictions on outsiders' ability to
obtain, analyze and use data gathered from its platforms. The
company has sent legal demands and sometimes filed suits against
entities it accuses of seeking data access for nefarious
purposes.
What limitations on social media data scraping are enforceable
has been the subject of litigation in recent years, with platforms
arguing they have both a right and responsibility to prevent the
unauthorized use of user-generated data.
The NYU project has already collected the targeting data behind
more than 200,000 ads. Researchers say it has exposed areas where
the publicly available archive of political ads Facebook created
after the 2016 election is failing to log advertisements that
should be in the system.
Facebook said it has appreciated the NYU researchers' efforts to
improve the ad library, but won't stand for violations of its
rules.
Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU's Tandon School of
Engineering who helps oversee the Ad Observatory project, said,
"The only thing that would prompt us to stop doing this would be if
Facebook would do it themselves, which we have called on them to
do."
Facebook's letter to NYU defended its efforts to make
information available to outside researchers, noting that the
company has set up an official academic partnership to study the
site's impact on voters during the 2020 U.S. election.
Rebekah Tromble, a Georgetown University researcher who
participates in that company-approved program, said Facebook
deserves credit for its own research initiatives, but added that
she disagrees with its action against the NYU project.
"There's far too much critical information closed up behind
Facebook's walled garden," said Ms. Tromble, associate director of
Georgetown's Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. "And
efforts like the Ad Observatory play a critical role in breaking
down those walls."
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 23, 2020 17:58 ET (21:58 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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