Facebook Cuts Off NYU Researcher Access, Prompting Rebuke From Lawmakers (techcrunch.com) 36
Facebook shut down accounts belonging to two academic researchers late Tuesday, cutting off their ability to study political ads and misinformation on the world's biggest social network. From a report: The company accused the academics of engaging in "unauthorized scraping" and compromising user privacy on the platform, claims that Facebook's many critics are slamming as a thin pretense for killing the transparency work. The company took action against Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy, two well-known researchers affiliated with NYU's Cybersecurity for Democracy project who have long sparred with the company.
The move cuts off their access to Facebook's Ad Library -- one of the company's only meaningful transparency efforts to date -- and data on popular posts from the social media monitoring service CrowdTangle. Facebook has a history with Edelson and McCoy. The company served the pair cease and desist letters just weeks before the 2020 election, calling on the team to disable an opt-in browser tool called Ad Observer and unpublish their findings. Ad Observer is a browser tool anyone can install that's designed to give researchers a rare glimpse into how Facebook targets the ads that have transformed it into a trillion-dollar company. "Over the last several years, we've used this access to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, identify misinformation in political ads including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook's apparent amplification of partisan misinformation," Edelson said on Twitter. "After years of abusing users' privacy, it's rich for Facebook to use it as an excuse to crack down on researchers exposing its problems. I've asked the FTC to confirm that this excuse is as bogus as it sounds," tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The move cuts off their access to Facebook's Ad Library -- one of the company's only meaningful transparency efforts to date -- and data on popular posts from the social media monitoring service CrowdTangle. Facebook has a history with Edelson and McCoy. The company served the pair cease and desist letters just weeks before the 2020 election, calling on the team to disable an opt-in browser tool called Ad Observer and unpublish their findings. Ad Observer is a browser tool anyone can install that's designed to give researchers a rare glimpse into how Facebook targets the ads that have transformed it into a trillion-dollar company. "Over the last several years, we've used this access to uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, identify misinformation in political ads including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook's apparent amplification of partisan misinformation," Edelson said on Twitter. "After years of abusing users' privacy, it's rich for Facebook to use it as an excuse to crack down on researchers exposing its problems. I've asked the FTC to confirm that this excuse is as bogus as it sounds," tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
Pot, kettle, black (Score:1, Redundant)
It's even richer to hear a Congressman calling some other entity a hypocrite. Doesn't matter which party, notice.
Re:Pot, kettle, black (Score:4, Informative)
Kind of like your Subject, but your what-about-ism is wrong. There are individual differences among politicians. Some of them are clearly YUGE hypocrites or SUPER liars or both, while many actually cling to their principles (more or less strongly). Maybe part of your actual problem is that you don't like the clingiest principles?
But about Facebook and politics... I recently finished The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshona Zuboff. The book has some flaws, but has lots of interesting data and tends to make you think. Primary focus on Facebook with a secondary focus on the google. The data that is ringing a bell with me as regards this story is Facebook's research into encouraging (or discouraging) voting. My thought on that foundation is that Facebook could look at all of the candidates in 2022 and decide which ones are most Facebook friendly and encourage the voters most likely to vote for those candidates to do so.
But it might not matter much. Thanks to scientific gerrymandering, there are very few close elections that can be tipped, even by the mighty Zuckerberg. The voters have been picked before they can pick the politicians, and the part of the American government that was supposed to be most responsive to the will of the voters, the House of Representatives, has become an ugly joke. The incumbents are reelected no matter what.
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My actual problem is that I despise hypocrisy no matter where it is. It is founded on a lie, and practised by those who have sold their soul and therefore have nothing else of worth to offer anyone.
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I think the interesting hypocrisy for politicians is when they are announcing certain principles but acting against those principles. The question of whether they believe in the principles they are proclaiming is actually different.
Perhaps it will help to cite the most obvious example? I think Ted Cruz is more obvious than Rand Paul. The two of them actually have principles, though brainwashed principles, but Ted Cruz is much more explicit and hypocritical about ignoring his principles at the drop of a hat.
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Eh? What's the connection to the thread or the story?
Or maybe it's some kind of epistemological claim that reality doesn't exist? Just reading an interesting bit about how Umberto Eco was accused of not believing in the existence of the moon...
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Pretending there is no connection to the story is a bit like pretending a story about rainbows has no connection to precipitation.
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Eh?
What point do you think you are trying to make?
(I think I smell a troll. And it smells angry.)
Re: Pot, kettle, black (Score:2)
Re:Pot, kettle, false equivalency (Score:4, Insightful)
inode_buddha face-farted:
It's even richer to hear a Congressman calling some other entity a hypocrite. Doesn't matter which party, notice.
You say that specifically so that you can lump actual public servants, such as Ron Wyden, in with odious, Trump-felching slimeballs like Ron Johnson, and conscienceless party hacks like the execrable Mitch McConnell, in order to trivialize the treasonous actions of the latter two, and the rest of their ilk.
Senator Wyden has a long history of arguing and legislating for the rights of individuals in the digital realm. He has consistently opposed blunderbuss legislation, such as the DMCA, and the long-term lobbying effort in favor of mandating back doors in consumer-facing encryption by the FBI, and the so-called "key escrow" proposals by the intelligence community, because he actually understands the issues well enough to see the actual legal and security risks those ill-though-out, mandatory-crippleware policies would create for everyone including law enforcement and spy agencies. He has consistently suppored such cornerstones of a free and open digital society as right-to-repair, the right to digital privacy, and net neutrality, and is probably the single most knowledgeable person in the Senate on tech-related issues in general, and digital rights issues in particular.
Contrast that record with Ron Johnson's characterization of the treasonous Trumptard insurrectionists who attempted violently to overthrow the Consitutional election process by physically invading the Capitol Building as "harmless tourists," and his continuing support for the former Twitter-troll-in-chief's utterly bogus claims of widespread, systematic vote fraud in the presidential election of 2020, and try to convince me that you're not attempting a deliberate - and blatant - false equivalency between the two.
Oh, that's right: you can't, because that's precisely what you're trying, very, very clumsily, to do ...
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Nothing that you say excuses anything. Try growing a spine someday.
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bongey blathered:
To sum your comment "My team is better than yours" . Politics isn't suppose to be a sport, you will never learn this sadly.
No, dickwad, my comment is properly summarized as, "You are painting all politicians with the same broad brush, while the truth is that your sweeping generalization about all politicians is, like most sweeping generalizations, completely false regarding some politicians."
While it's true that both politicians I characterized as slimeballs are Republicans, I did not say that all Republicans are swine - because not all of them are. Mitt Romney, for instance, is a person of principle, where pol
Privary Rapist blocks research on privacy raping (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Privary Rapist blocks research on privacy rapin (Score:5, Funny)
Privacy Rapist ...
Worst browser extension -- ever.
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Privacy Rapist ...
Worst browser extension -- ever.
You don't need to install it though. Use Chrome instead, it's built right in.
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Yes, a partisan political effort. But what really surprises me is why the hell does some senator from Oregon care what another state's uni is doing?
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Why does he care? Because he's going after FB in general, not just what is happening with NYU.
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Kernel developers didn't like being the subject of study. Neither does Facebook.
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Same, stopped reading at “NYU”
"Unauthorized scraping" (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't unauthorized scraping what Cambridge Analytica was doing?
Re:"Unauthorized scraping" (Score:4, Informative)
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My understanding was that it was unauthorized, though CA had "mislead" FB. After the scandal FB had an excuse to clamp down and declare any but the most innocuous scraping efforts as unauthorized. In short unauthorized scraping has become a "user privacy" trump card that FB will play when it's convenient.
My guess is that the researchers got a little too close to FB secret sauce recipe. Since FB's not literally adding cocaine it's hard to regulate, though I think they should be held liable for issues proven
If corporations "are people" (Score:3)
Bookface is kind of a dick, and deserves an infinite face punching.
Clear violation ... (Score:3)
I've asked the FTC to confirm that this excuse is as bogus as it sounds," tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
Private Company... (Score:1)
Why don't they register as advertisers? (Score:1)
That would make Facebook hand them all the data on a silver platter, together with cocaine and blowjobs. ;)
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> That would make Facebook hand them all the data on a silver platter, together with cocaine and blowjobs. ;)
Can I have beer and hookers instead?
Sharing is caring (Score:1)
I though Zuck was all about sharing. He seems happy to share user data with Cambridge Analytica and he loves it when users share everything on their accounts. But why doesn't he want to share?
Facebook must have something to hide. (Score:1)
According to the article,
> Launched in March 2020, AlgorithmWatch provided a browser plug-in that would allow users to collect data from their Instagram feeds, providing insight into ...
> how the platform prioritizes pictures and videos. The project published findings regularly, showing that the algorithm encouraged photos that showed bare
> skin and that photos showing faces are ranked higher than screenshots of text.
> The NYU Ad Observatory, which tracked political advertising on the platform,