Facebook is already involved in the political struggle and is canceling accounts

Harmless work (in terms of possible interventions), which collects data on political activities but is not aimed at influencing voter decision-making, can also be blacklisted on Facebook. This raises the question of what Facebook’s position is and who is actually able to control and monitor it during its interventions.

Science versus Facebook

Every time a combination of science and politics is made, it sounds too dangerous. The polarity of any camps of opinion that might arise suggests a problem. However, the case and the NYU Ad Observatory project is clearly not like that. According to already published data, this is a collection of data on how it works and where political advertising is aimed.

Researchers at New York University set themselves the task of finding out how political marketers make decisions about targeting their clients’ advertising. How do groups choose where the advertisement will go and especially according to what criteria. However, the project itself did not even manage to fully show the obtained data and has already hit Facebook. As the platform, like almost most of today, operated through this social network, it was banned.

Facebook says the intervention was necessary. Because the project itself and its creators went around Facebook when they developed the add-on, which obtained data from volunteers involved in a survey on political advertising. However, the created add-on bypassed the company’s detection system. It adds that data was also collected from people who were not involved in the project and did not install the add-on.

Facebook is a master of itself

The dispute between the university and Facebook also reached the substance of the research itself. Representatives of the social network claim that the project could be achieved in such a way that the researchers were invited to a database that the company has already created today. It contains information about who paid for a political ad, when it was displayed, and even to whom. Researchers at NYU Ad Observ claim that Facebook’s data is superficial and does not have the data that their research wanted to access. And this is the answer to the question of what parameters are entered and how the advertiser decides to target the group.

The whole dispute will probably continue. The university considers Facebook’s intervention to be disproportionate. Their research, they claim, is important in terms of the basic principles of democracy that political advertising aims at and can influence voter decision-making:

“We think it’s important for democracy to be able to control who is trying to influence the public and how.”

This case only once again shows how much Facebook is its master. Its algorithms or human interventions are difficult to control, and society itself is thus practically the only one that resolves in the end in most cases. He decides and applies it. The attempt to discuss is usually in vain, the correction is lengthy. Facebook is actually the one who has the last word in most interventions. However, this does not always have to be the right solution.