FTC Exec Castigates Facebook For Axing Quiz On Political Ads

A senior Federal Trade Commission official is criticizing Facebook’s move to shut down the personal accounts of two academic researchers and terminate their probe into misinformation spread through political ads on the social network, Marcy Gordon reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: Facebook headquarters, California

Facebook wrongly used a 2019 data-privacy settlement with the FTC to justify shutting down the New York University researchers’ accounts this week, Samuel Levine, acting director of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau, said in a letter Thursday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Levine also said Facebook failed to honor a prior commitment to notify the FTC in advance of taking such an action.

Facebook maintained that the researchers violated its terms of service and were involved in unauthorized 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.

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,” Laura Edelson, the lead researcher behind NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy, said Wednesday.

Facebook agreed in a 2019 consent decree settlement with the FTC to pay a record $5 billion for alleged violations of the privacy of users’ personal data. But Levine said in his letter that the consent decree allows Facebook to create exceptions to data collection restrictions “for good-faith research in the public interest.”

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