NYU Researchers Decry Facebook's Decision to Disable Their Accounts, Cut Them Off From Essential Tools

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Facebook Inc. disabled the personal accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on the social network, claiming they are scraping data in violation of its terms of service.

Facebook also cut the researchers off from Facebook’s APIs, a technology used to share data from Facebook to other apps or services, and disabled other apps and Pages associated with the research project, which is called NYU Ad Observatory. Facebook said it cut off the researchers to remain in compliance with a 2019 data privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. The government punished the company for failing to police how outside developers collected data.

But Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, said, “Facebook is silencing us because our work often calls attention to problems on its platform.” (Kurt Wagner and Naomi Nix / Bloomberg)

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