Facebook: Damian Collins and US politicians criticise data ban

Facebook's decision to block access to some SLOTXO academics researching political ads and disinformation has been criticised by UK and US politicians.

Damian Collins MP accused Facebook of shutting down legitimate research to protect its own interests.

And Senate committee chairmen Ron Wyden and Mark Warner also spoke out.

Facebook has accused researchers from New York University's Cybersecurity for Democracy team of collecting user data without consent.

On Tuesday, the social network disabled their accounts and blocked access to the platform, saying the team's Ad Observer browser extension breached its policies.

The team's project asks people to install the extension, which then enables them to share information with researchers about the Facebook ads they see.

Cybersecurity for Democracy projects have included research into misleading political ads, right-wing misinformation and false claims about vaccines and Covid-19.

But Facebook's product management director Mike Clark blogged that research should not happen at the expense of people's privacy, and said they had violated the company's terms of service.

"The researchers gathered data by creating a browser extension that was programmed to evade our detection systems and scrape data such as user names, ads, links to user profiles... some of which is not publicly viewable on the platform."