does friendly for facebook use less data

Facebook confirmed that they sent the letter to NYU, but did not provide Digiday with further detail on the status of enforcing its demand regarding the project. Last October as Election Day loomed, Facebook demanded that they shut down the project and delete the data associated with it because it allegedly violated the company’s terms of service regarding data scraping. Her team at the NYU Ad Observatory had built a tool to facilitate analysis of Facebook’s political ad information available through the company’s ad library API, a separate data set from what is being made available in the new ad targeting data set. “Any conclusions drawn would be inherently skewed, and it would be difficult to say anything about ad targeting as a whole,” Edelson told Digiday.Įdelson has run into another roadblock when trying to analyze Facebook’s political ad data. Because of Facebook’s impressions threshold in its new data set, researchers could be prevented from evaluating findings like those or determining whether there were other examples of ad-enabled disinformation. Leading up to the election in September 2020, anti-disinformation organization Avaaz found ads from political groups on the right and left on Facebook featuring misleading information. Political campaigns could use Facebook’s minute ad targeting parameters to reach very small groups of people in precise geographic areas to fuel the spread of false information about an issue or candidate or suppress voting among specific groups. The constraint may seem insignificant, but Edelson said it is a big deal. The company said the restriction “is one of several steps we have taken to protect users’ privacy.” The primary reason for her disinterest is a threshold Facebook set for whether a particular ad is included in its ad targeting data set, excluding ads with fewer than 100 impressions. “I don’t have access to FORT and I’m not planning on applying for access right now,” she told Digiday in an email. candidate in computer science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering studying online political communication, from even applying to access it. The limits on Facebook’s data details are enough to dissuade Laura Edelson, a Ph.D. “This is just a first step at providing data to study Facebook’s impact but we are constantly evolving our products to meet researchers’ needs while putting privacy first,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

This frustrates researchers like him who want to understand the nuances of ad campaigns served to people on Facebook, a firm whose business is built on delivering ads based on refined targeting options and makes a point of promoting what it considers to be benefits of personalized advertising.Īs governments in the U.S and overseas consider new laws or reforms to old ones to address the negative impacts of social media on society, privacy, children’s mental health and elections, academic researchers want to provide analysis based on hard data to help inform those policies. In his general experience, Papakyriakopoulos said, access to data from social media platforms for academic research follows a pattern of “conscious obscurity” by design. Much like advertisers who have long lamented a lack of transparency for measuring ad exposure and brand safety on social platforms including Facebook, academic researchers say the restrictions Facebook places on how they can tap into data and its level of intricacy is par for the course with social media platform data access in general. The limit is meant to protect people’s privacy but can have the effect of concealing political ad activity on the platform. For example, Facebook has instituted a minimum threshold on the number of impressions, or times a single ad was served, to be included in the data set. But details of the targeting are limited, as are other aspects of the data.

Does friendly for facebook use less data