The company also agreed to meet with the groups every six months for the following three years, and is building a tool to let anyone search housing-related ads in the U.S. targeted to different areas across the country.After an uproar over its lack of transparency on political ads Facebook ran ahead of the 2016 election, a sharp contrast to how ads are regulated on traditional media, the company created an ad archive that includes details such as who paid for an ad and when it ran. But it does not share information about who gets served the ad.Outside researchers tried to remedy this. But in August, Facebook shut down the personal accounts of a pair of New York University researchers and shuttered their investigation into misinformation spread through political ads on the social network.Facebook said at the time that the researchers violated its terms of service and were involved in unauthorised data collection from its massive network.The academics, however said 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.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, in response to the shutdown.
Source link
