Facebook’s Election-Week War on Accountability is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Facebook this week took legal action to try and limit access by researches to see the ads that politicians are targeting users with.

But rather than embrace the Ad Observatory as a partner that rectifies the limitations of its own systems, Facebook has sent a legal threat to the university, demanding that the project shut down and delete the data it has already collected. Facebook’s position is that collecting data using "automated means" (including scraping) is a violation of its Terms of Service, even when the NYU Ad Observatory is acting on behalf of Facebook's own users, and even in furtherance of the urgent mission of fighting political disinformation during an election that U.S. politicians call the most consequential and contested in living memory.

I think this is different than the typical sleazy profit-over-everything behavior that Facebook typically exhibits. I suspect that they are genuinely concerned that the ads being sent through their systems will be able to show that their platform was used to suppress votes and to materially, and negatively, affect our democratic processes. The last thing they want is a bunch of evidence, that could end up in court, showing that.

Remember as you think about this that ads running on Facebook are often made by algorithms. So, there will be millions of different messages. This is why efforts like the Ad Observatory are so important. Facebook doesn't know the ads running on its own systems.