Facebook has blocked a research group from New York University studying the social network's ... [+] political advertising. The group, called the NYU Ad Observatory, began in September 2020 in collaboration with thousands of volunteers who downloaded a plug-in to automatically send researchers copies of the political ads served to their accounts. As a part of the settlement, the FTC also imposed new data privacy restrictions and new accountability standards. Facebook’s own Ad Library does provide detail of political candidate’ and organizations’ advertising — including overall spending, geographic targeting and a repository of the ads themselves. However, the Ad Observatory’s work has found examples of political ads that Facebook missed and failed to label.

Source: Forbes August 04, 2021 22:41 UTC