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WSJ News Exclusive | Facebook

Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research
Project Into Political Ad Targeting
Jeff Horwitz

6-8 minutes

Facebook Inc. is demanding that a New York University research

project cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting
practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the
platform without the company’s permission.

The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched

last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited
more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser
extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows
them.

In a letter sent Oct. 16 to the researchers behind the NYU Ad

Observatory, Facebook said the project violates provisions in its
terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection from its site.

“Scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a

permissible means of collecting information from us,” said the
letter, written by a Facebook privacy policy official, Allison Hendrix.
If the university doesn’t end the project and delete the data it has
collected, she wrote, “you may be subject to additional

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enforcement action.”

The clash between the social-media giant and a major research

university comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over political
advertising on social media ahead of next month’s U.S. election.
Facebook in recent weeks has said it would bar new political ads
ahead of Election Day and suspend all political ads indefinitely that
evening to prevent the spread of paid misinformation about the
election outcome.

Following a furor about the opaque nature of political advertising in

the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook launched an archive of
advertisements that run on its platform, with information such as
who paid for an ad, when it ran and the geographic location of
people who saw it. But that library excludes information about the
targeting that determines who sees the ads.

The researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory said they

wanted to provide journalists, researchers, policy makers, and
others with the ability to search political ads by state and contest to
see what messages are targeted to specific audiences and how
those ads are funded.

Facebook’s demand that the project stop its collection drew

opposition from proponents of greater ad transparency, including
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), a sponsor of a bill called the
Honest Ads Act that would mandate greater transparency in online
political advertising.

“It’s unacceptable that in the middle of an election, Facebook is

making it harder for Americans to get information about online
political ads,” Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement to The Wall Street
Journal. Social media platforms have pledged to make online

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advertising more transparent, she said, but Facebook’s threatened

action against NYU “is further evidence that voluntary standards
are insufficient.”

After a version of this article was published, Facebook said in a

statement to the Journal that it wouldn’t take any action on the
NYU project’s data collection until well after the election.

Facebook earlier said that it already offers more transparency into

political advertising than either traditional media or rival social
platforms, and that the automated collection of data from users’
on-platform activity—even with their permission—poses an
unacceptable privacy threat.

“We informed NYU months ago that moving forward with a project
to scrape people’s Facebook information would violate our terms,”
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said in a statement to the
Journal, adding that if the project doesn’t shut down voluntarily,
Facebook could make technical changes to its own code that
would block the NYU researchers from collecting data.

For Facebook, allowing outsiders to access data on its platform

has been tricky territory. Following the uproar over Cambridge
Analytica, a company that obtained unauthorized access to
Facebook user data for political profiling in 2016, the Federal
Trade Commission pushed Facebook to rein in third-party data
access. Facebook imposed a series of restrictions on outsiders’
ability to obtain, analyze and use data gathered from its
platforms.The company has sent legal demands and sometimes
filed suits against entities it accuses of seeking data access for
nefarious purposes

What limitations on social media data scraping are enforceable

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has been the subject of litigation in recent years, with platforms

arguing they have both a right and responsibility to prevent the
unauthorized use of user-generated data.

The NYU project has already collected the targeting data behind
more than 200,000 ads. Researchers say it has exposed areas
where the publicly available archive of political ads Facebook
created after the 2016 election is failing to log advertisements that
should be in the system.

Facebook said it has appreciated the NYU researchers’ efforts to

improve the ad library, but won’t stand for violations of its rules.

Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU’s Tandon School of

Engineering who helps oversee the Ad Observatory project, said,
“The only thing that would prompt us to stop doing this would be if
Facebook would do it themselves, which we have called on them
to do.”

Facebook’s letter to NYU defended its efforts to make information

available to outside researchers, noting that the company has set
up an official academic partnership to study the site’s impact on
voters during the 2020 U.S. election.

Rebekah Tromble, a George Washington University researcher

who participates in that company-approved program, said
Facebook deserves credit for its own research initiatives, but
added that she disagrees with its action against the NYU project.

“There’s far too much critical information closed up behind

Facebook’s walled garden,” said Ms. Tromble, director of George
Washington’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. “And
efforts like the Ad Observatory play a critical role in breaking down
those walls.”

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Corrections & Amplifications

Rebekah Tromble is the director of the Institute for Data,
Democracy and Politics at George Washington University. An
earlier version of this article incorrectly said her title is associate
director and misidentified the school as Georgetown University.
(Corrected on Oct. 23)

Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com

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