Thread by @doctorow

#AdObservatory is an NYU project that enlists Facebook users to record the ads they see, building a database of the ads Facebook runs and to check whether Facebook is adhering to its own policies, for example, on labeling and limiting political ads

adobservatory.org

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The project has been extensively used by journalists and transparency activists to hold Facebook to account for failing to live up to its own standards. It relies on a browser plugin that Facebook users choose to install to help with the transparency effort.

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Facebook's dismal track record on advertising, combined with the urgent concerns about disinformation in paid political advertising in the runup to the 2020 election, are cause for alarm.

The company, however, sees it as cause for a legal threat.

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Facebook has sent a legal threat to NYU demanding that they take down Ad Observatory and stop supporting the plugin (once again, this is a plugin that Facebook users choose to install specifically to hold the company to account).

politico.com/news/2020/10/2…

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Holy fucking shit, is that a bad look for Facebook.

I mean, even by Facebook standards, that is a bad look for Facebook. People and institutions across the USA are getting ready for pogroms and civil war 2.0 and Facebook's answer is to sic lawyers on its academic critics.

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Facebook claims the plugin violates its terms of service, and while the company got its start by violating Myspace's terms of service and building tools to help its users import their Myspace messages to Facebook, they have since changed tunes.

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In 2009, Facebook set US legal precedent by suing Power Ventures, a company that offered users a way to read their Facebook messages and messages from rival services in a combined inbox.

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They said that breaking FB's terms of service was a violation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a broad cybercrime bill passed in haste after a screening of Wargames panicked President Ronald Reagan, then in the early stages of dementia.

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FB's legal threat against Ad Observatory builds on that groundbreaking precedent, but the facts here are very different. For starters, the precedent been largely overturned by Linkedin's failed bid to block a competitor called Hiq from scraping its listings.

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But more importantly, FB is trying to suppress academic researchers who have revealed the company's indifference to upholding its own election disinformation policies from continuing to report on its misdeeds.

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Here, FB is once again on thin legal ice. Last year, they suffered a stinging defeat in Sandvig v Barr, where the ACLU got a judge to say that the First Amendment interests of watchdogs trumped FB's terms of service.

aclu.org/cases/sandvig-…

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NYU, to its credit, has publicly announced that they intend to wipe their asses with FB's threat.

Meanwhile, this is another reason for you to #deletefacebook and then write to your Member of Congress and ask them to direct the DoJ to break up that cancer of a company.

eof/