And the Award for Chutzpah Goes To

Facebook, of course, for using "privacy" as a fig-leaf to boot academic researchers from the platform for tracking deceptive and political advertising.

The real reason for this is that that the NYU Ad Observatory was uncovering their dirty laundry:

A group of researchers at New York University studying Facebook’s political advertising targeting practices has accused the social media company of “silencing” them after it severed their access to the platform.

The NYU Ad Observatory, part of the university’s Center for Cybersecurity, has since last year run a project whereby 16,000 volunteers downloaded a browser extension that allows them to collect data on the political advertising shown to those users on Facebook.

It aimed to uncover trends around ad funding and misinformation, and whether content was being microtargeted at certain demographics. The department is also part of a coalition of researchers studying coronavirus vaccine misinformation.

However, Facebook, which had not authorised the project, last year sent cease and desist letters to the researchers, urging them to end the data collection, citing privacy concerns.

Late on Tuesday, Facebook said in a blog post that it had “disabled the accounts, apps, Pages and platform access” associated with the project, including the personal accounts of the academics, for violating its terms of service.

………

The social network has sought to better control the data that outsiders can access in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data of 87m users was harvested by an academic and shared with the now-defunct political consultancy.

If you think that Facebook was unaware of what Cambridge Analytica was doing, you have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie.

They let it go on with a wink and a nod.

But critics argue that it has wielded privacy concerns in order to block responsible research into its platform. A separate Facebook-backed initiative to share data with social sciences academics in 2019 was also hampered by the company’s privacy worries.

"Privacy worries," should be translated as, "Cover-up wrongdoing."

Facebook has a public political ads transparency library that contains information such as who is behind political ads and how much was spent on them. However, it does not outline how ads were targeted at users, and the library itself has been faulty.

The data is faulty because Facebook wants it that way.

………

“Over the last several years, we’ve used this access to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, to identify misinformation in political ads including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook’s apparent amplification of partisan misinformation,” [Head of the Ad Observatory Laura] Edelson said. “By suspending our accounts, Facebook has effectively ended all this work.”

This is a deliberate result of Facebook's actions.

Openness, and privacy, are an anathema to Facebook, and any attempt to determine the finer points of their business practices will be met with obstruction and lies.