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Facebook shut down accounts belonging to two academic researchers late Tuesday, cutting off their ability to study political ads and misinformation on the world's biggest social network.
The company accused the academics of engaging in "unauthorized scraping" and compromising user privacy on the platform, claims that Facebook's many critics are slamming as a
thin pretense for killing the transparency work.
The company took action against Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy, two well-known researchers affiliated with
NYU's Cybersecurity for Democracy project who have long sparred with the company. The move cuts off their access to Facebook's Ad Library — one of the company's only meaningful transparency efforts to date — and data on popular posts from the social media monitoring service CrowdTangle.
Facebook has a history with Edelson and McCoy.
The company served the pair cease and desist letters just weeks before the 2020 election, calling on the team to disable an opt-in browser tool called Ad Observer and unpublish their findings. Ad Observer is a
browser tool anyone can install that's designed to give researchers a rare glimpse into how Facebook targets the ads that have transformed it into a trillion-dollar company.
"Over the last several years, we've used this access to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, identify misinformation in political ads including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook's apparent amplification of partisan misinformation," Edelson said on Twitter.
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