Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is one of several senators pressing Facebook for more information about ... [+] its decision to disable a group of NYU researchers’ tools for studying political ads on the social network. There’s no clear impact on how the dispute could disrupt Facebook’s online advertising overall, but for many it calls to mind the most infamous controversy over social media data-scraping. After Facebook in 2018 banned the now defunct British data firm Cambridge Analytica for misusing Facebook user data acquired by researchers, it sparked a global debate about data privacy, digital advertising and how social media can be used for manipulating politics. (In 2018, Carroll sued Cambridge Analytica and its parent company to learn what data they had collected about him from his Facebook profile.) “Facebook says it doesn’t want to be the ‘arbiter of truth,’ except when it comes to the truth about its own operations,” said Carroll, who starred in a 2019 Netflix documentary about social media, data privacy and political manipulation.

Source: Forbes August 09, 2021 17:06 UTC