[Air-L] FB statement on banning NYU researchers for scraping

[Joly MacFie]

And, furthermore, here is Mozilla's take.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/why-facebooks-claims-about-the-ad-observer-are-wrong/

Recently the Surgeon General of the United States weighed in
<https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf>
on
the spread of disinformation on major platforms and its effects on people
and society. He echoed the calls of researchers, activists and
organizations, like Mozilla, for the major platforms to release *more* data,
and to provide access to researchers in order to analyze the spread and
impact of misinformation.

Yet Facebook has again taken steps to shut down this exact kind of research
on its platform, a troubling pattern we have witnessed from Facebook
including sidelining their own Crowdtangle
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html> and killing
a suite of tools
<https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools> from
Propublica and Mozilla in 2019.

Most recently, Facebook has terminated the accounts
<https://knightcolumbia.org/content/researchers-nyu-knight-institute-condemn-facebooks-effort-to-squelch-independent-research-about-misinformation>
of
New York University researchers that built Ad Observer, an extension
dedicated to bringing greater transparency to political advertising that
was critical for researchers and journalists during the presidential
election.

Facebook claims the accounts were shut down due to privacy problems with
the Ad Observer.  In our view, those claims simply do not hold water. We
know this, because before encouraging users to contribute data to the Ad
Observer, which we’ve done repeatedly, we reviewed the code ourselves. And
in this blog post, we want to explain why we believe people can contribute
to this important research without sacrificing their privacy.

Anytime you give your data to another party, whether Facebook or Mozilla or
researchers at New York University, it is important that you know whether
that party is trustworthy, what data will be collected, and what will be
done with that data. Those are critical things to consider before you
potentially grant access to your data. And those are also key factors for
Mozilla when we consider recommending an extension.

Before Mozilla decided to recommend Ad Observer, we reviewed it twice,
conducting both a code review and examining the consent flow to ensure
users will understand exactly what they are installing. In both cases the
team responsible for this add-on responded quickly to our feedback, made
changes to their code, and demonstrated a commitment to the privacy of
their users. We also conducted an in-depth design review of Ad Observer,
the results of which can be found here
<https://bug1676407.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9187255>.

We decided to recommend Ad Observer because our reviews assured us that it
respects user privacy and supports transparency. It collects ads, targeting
parameters and metadata associated with the ads.* It does not collect
personal posts or information about your friends. And it does not compile a
user profile on its servers.* The extension also allows you to see what
data has been collected by visiting the “My Archive” tab. It gives you the
choice to opt in to sharing additional demographic information to aid
research into how specific groups are being targeted, but even that is off
by default.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Ad Observer is open source, so
anybody can see the code
<https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-collector> and
confirm it is designed properly and doing what it purports to do.

Of course, companies like Facebook need to be proactive about third-parties
that might be collecting data on their platform and putting their users at
risk. Figuring out what third-parties to allow under what circumstances is
certainly not an easy task. But in this case, the application of its policy
is counterproductive. This is why Mozilla makes exceptions for good-faith
security research
<https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/08/01/safe-harbor-for-security-bug-bounty-participants/>
in
our own products and why we have been supportive of
<https://s3.amazonaws.com/kfai-documents/documents/d6ebc73dd9/Facebook_Letter.pdf>
 calls
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScLcoINv_uMedadkMvp4ZUSLmayCLQZPKQcbiV1cnGXtpy_4Q/viewform>
for
Facebook to create safe harbors for public-interest research.

The truth is that major platforms continue to be a safe haven for
disinformation and extremism — wreaking havoc on people, our elections and
society. We actually launched Mozilla Rally <https://rally.mozilla.org/> to
take back control of research from unresponsive platforms like
Facebook. Telling the truth about misinformation needs consent, clarity and
community, and businesses built on people’s data shouldn’t be scared of
telling us what that data is used for. We’ve also pushed the industry
through the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation,
<https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Mozilla-letter-to-EU-Commission-on-Facebook-transparency-31-01-19-1.pdf>
  encouraged
<https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2021/05/27/advancing-system-level-change-with-ad-transparency-in-the-eu-dsa/>
the
European Commission to mandate disclosure of all advertisements on major
platforms and encouraged users to contribute their data to Ad Observer. We
need tools like Ad Observer to help us shine a light on the darkest corners
of the web. And rather than standing in the way of efforts to hold
platforms accountable, we all need to work together to support and improve
these tools.



>
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 10:40 AM K Eckert <stine.eckert at wayne.edu> wrote:
>
> This is the link, I think
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opinion/facebook-misinformation.html
>
> --
> --
>

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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