Facebook
"It feels like Facebook is trying to intimidate us, and not just us, but they're trying to send a message to other independent researchers that are trying to study their platform," Damon McCoy, associate professor at NYU, told NPR. "We need transparency and accountability."
According to Facebook, however, the NYU Ad Observatory researchers were breaking its terms of service.
"NYU's Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our terms of service," Mike Clark, Facebook's Product Management Director, wrote in a blog.
The NYU team launched a browser extension last year that allows Facebook users to voluntarily share data with the researchers. The extension collected data on which ads users were shown and why they were shown to those users. The extension was installed by some 16,000 people.
In defense of the company's decision, Clark claims that the researchers were violating users' privacy.
"We disabled the accounts, apps, Pages and platform access associated with NYU's Ad Observatory Project and its operators...to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people's privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order," Clark wrote.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) order that Clark referenced is an agreement between the company and the commission blocking the sort of privacy breach seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In that case, Facebook paid a $5 billion penalty for misleading users about how their data was being used.
However, the NYU researchers claim that the information they're gathering isn't private data like that used by Cambridge Analytica.
"We really don't collect anything that isn't an ad, that isn't public, and we're pretty careful about how we do it," Laura Edelson, a doctoral candidate at NYU, told NPR.
According to Edelson, the code for the team's extension was independently reviewed by outside experts before going into use, and the code is public information.
Again, Facebook contests the team's claims that they only collected data from users who had consented to share said data. Facebook also argues that the extension violates users' privacy by collecting information about advertisers on the platform, including the advertiser's name, photos, and Facebook ID.
"The researchers gathered data... such as usernames, ads, links to user profiles and "Why am I seeing this ad?" information, some of which is not publicly-viewable on Facebook," writes Clark. "The extension also collected data about Facebook users who did not install it or consent to the collection."
According to Clark, researchers first archived the data from non-consenting users in a database that was once publicly available but which is now offline.
In the past, NYU researchers have found several flaws in Facebook's political ad policies, including the relative freedom to post misleading political ads and gaps in the political ad disclosures. The group also monitored the right-leaning imbalance in political misinformation engagement by users on the site.
"We don't think Facebook should get to decide who gets to study it and who doesn't," said Edelson.
There are methods through which researchers can gain access to some data on the site, but only through programs under the company's control.
Meanwhile, legislators on the left have been slamming Facebook's decision online.
"After years of abusing users' privacy, it's rich for Facebook to use it as an excuse to crack down on researchers exposing its problems," Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, D, wrote on Twitter
So far, the FTC has declined researcher's requests for comment on Facebook's allegedly "bogus" excuse for booting the team off the platform.
