Facebook escalates war on accountability

Privacywashing vs Ad Observer.

Facebook just escalated its war on NYU’s Ad Observer project, a project that monitors and discloses Facebook’s failure to live up to its promise to block paid disinformation.

Here’s how that works. Facebook users volunteer to download and install Ad Observer, a browser plugin. This plugin scrapes the ads Facebook shows that user. They are cleaned of any personally identifying information and uploaded to the Ad Observatory.

The Observatory is an archive that accountability journalists and researchers can mine to see whether FB is keeping its promises to label political ads and block paid disinformation. It’s proof that FB does NOT live up to these promises.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

FB hates this. They threatened the NYU team with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, claiming that their violations of its terms of service violated this law (this is a gross overreach, and the law was since substantially narrowed by the Supreme Court):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#cfaa

At the same time, they waged a disinformation war against the project, falsely claiming that it was collecting Facebook users’ data. The plugin is free/open source…