Facebook bans vaccine hoax researchers, blames FTC

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Photo: Graeme Jennings (Getty Images)

Members of a New York University research team studying political advertising and covid-19 disinformation on Facebook found their accounts suspended Tuesday night, with Facebook pinning action on the confidentiality agreement that he entered into with federal regulators in 2019.

Laura Edelson, a doctoral candidate at the Tandon School of Engineering, said Facebook had suspended accounts connected to the NYU project, Cybersecurity for Democracy, cutting off access to more than two dozen researchers and journalists examining the spread disinformation online.

Facebook suspended the accounts of three researchers as well as team access to Facebook’s ad library and Crowdtangle, which provide data on how often particular posts are viewed, liked and shared.

Among the projects affected by Facebook’s move, the Virality Project, launched by the Stanford Internet Observatory, is working to understand the disinformation about covid-19 being spread by Facebook. The effort is supported by NYU and the University of Washington.

Facebook silences us because our work often draws attention to issues on its platform.

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Damon McCoy, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the NYU school, blasted the move, accusing Facebook of trying to crush legitimate research into the company’s role in delivering harmful content.

With its platform awash in vaccine misinformation and partisan campaigns to manipulate the public, Facebook should welcome independent research, not shut it down, McCoy said.

Facebook’s director of project management Mike Clark wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that the move was prompted by an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission to protect user privacy. (The FTC did not respond when asked to comment.)

Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor at Princeton University, said Facebook’s justification was just a pretext to hinder academic research that would hold Facebook accountable.

Facebook’s legal argument is wrong, Mayer tweeted.

A browser extension used by the research team called Ad Observer allows individual users to participate in research by automatically copying any ads they come across on Facebook. By default, this means that users must give their consent, even if none of their personal information is collected through the app.

Facebook silences us because our work often draws attention to issues on its platform, Edelson said. Worse yet, Facebook uses user privacy, a fundamental belief that we have always put first in our work, as an excuse to do so.

Facebook claims that the Ad Observer extension has collected data from Facebook users who have not installed it or have not consented to the collection. But what the company is referring to are the page names that advertisers paid Facebook to inject into user feeds.

Ironically, the browser extension that Facebook claims to be the problem has not been affected by the suspensions. The thousands of users who have downloaded Ad Observer continue to capture this data. One of the suspended Facebook accounts is also owned by someone whose work is not affiliated with the tool.

Facebook went on to say that it had tried to come up with a more privacy-protective tool, but failed to mention that the tool, known as FORT, has significant limitations. Its dataset, for example, only includes ads that Facebook itself has identified as political. It only includes ads that ran in the three months leading up to the 2020 election. This makes it unnecessary for most searches.

Blatantly, Facebook makes no mention of the fact that the accounts it has targeted for suspension are implicated in research into covid-19 plots, which remain rampant on the platform.

Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lambasted Facebook for his decision, saying the NYU team exposed predatory frauds and financial schemes on the platform, and repeatedly uncovered proof that Facebook was serving ads that violate its own terms of service.

For several years now, I have used social media platforms like Facebook to work with and better empower independent researchers, whose efforts constantly improve the integrity and security of social media platforms by exposing harmful activity and operating, Warner said. Instead, Facebook has apparently done the opposite.

Sadly, this is just the latest in a series of cheeky maneuvers by Facebook to hide how its business model is hurting people and our democracy. This is unacceptable, Jessica Gonzlez, co-CEO of advocacy group Free Press, told Gizmodo.

Facebook has dodged civil rights leaders, activists, shareholders, academics and even lawmakers who try to hold the company accountable for its hatred and lies and other abuses, Gonzlez said. As we fight the pandemic, attacks on our democracy and white supremacy, we need more of the kind of research NYU’s Cyber ​​Security and Democracy team was doing, not more self-serving tactics from Facebook.

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