Facebook has confirmed that it banned the personal accounts of researchers from the NYU Ad Observatory this week. The researchers were looking into ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the platform before the ban was imposed.

According to the social media giant, the ban was put in place as the researchers were scraping data from the platform in order to aid their study, which Facebook now has a problem with.

If that sounds a little glib, it is because the Cambridge Analytica scandal of a couple of years ago involved similar tactics, with Facebook having full knowledge of what was going on.

As the researchers explained earlier in the year when they signalled their intent to look into this subject, “Absent strong required disclosure, tools such as Ad Observer provide a way for researchers and journalists to hold Facebook and other platforms accountable, and explore how mis- and disinformation travels online.”

As such, an academic organisation like the Ad Observatory is something that Facebook should be looking to collaborate with, instead of ban, but the company is not wavering in its enforcement of Terms of Service (ToS) on the matter.

“NYU’s Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our Terms of Service. We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order,” noted Mike Clark, Product Management director at Facebook in a blog post.

“We told the researchers a year ago, in summer of 2020, that their Ad Observatory extension would violate our Terms even before they launched the tool. In October, we sent them a formal letter notifying them of the violation of our Terms of Service and granted them 45 days to comply with our request to stop scraping data from our website. The deadline ended on November 30, long after Election Day. We continued to engage with the researchers on addressing our privacy concerns and offered them ways to obtain data that did not violate our Terms,” he added.

It therefore looks like Facebook is willing to engage with researchers around privacy and transparency, but only on its terms.

“We’ll continue to provide ways for responsible researchers to conduct studies that are in the public interest while protecting the security of our platform and the privacy of people who use it,” Clark concluded.

As for why the researchers and Facebook could not collaborate closely on what is clearly an important project, has not be explained at this stage.