Faced with a rising backlash over the spread of disinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, Facebook last year came up with a seemingly straightforward solution: It created an online library of all the advertisements on the social network.
Transparency, it decided, was the best disinfectant.
Ads would stay in the library for seven years, letting ordinary users see who was pushing what messages and how much they were paying to do it. Facebook gave researchers and journalists deeper access, allowing them to extract information directly from the library so they could create their own databases and tools to analyse the ads — and ferret out disinformation that had slipped past the social network’s safeguards.
“We know we can’t protect elections alone,” Facebook said when it unveiled the latest version of its Ad Library in March. “We’re committed to creating a new standard of transparency and authenticity for advertising.”
But instead of setting a new standard, Facebook appears to have fallen short. While ordinary users can look up individual ads without a problem, access to the library’s data is so plagued by bugs and technical constraints that it is effectively useless as a way to comprehensively track political advertising, according to independent researchers and two previously unreported studies on the archive’s reliability, one by the French government and the other by researchers at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser.
The problems raise new questions about Facebook’s commitment to battling disinformation and reflect the struggles of big tech firms and governments across the world to counter it.
US officials are already grappling with Russian attempts to interfere in the 2020 presidential race and are powerless to stop American tricksters from joining the fray because they are protected by the First Amendment. In Europe, an ambitious effort to build an early warning system fell flat during European Parliament elections in May, producing no alerts, despite Russian disinformation campaigns that officials said were designed to sway public opinion and depress voter turnout.
For Facebook, in particular, it is an especially challenging moment: The company was ordered to pay a record $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday for privacy violations, and it agreed to better police how it handles its users’ data. The measures, though, will do little to help the company with its disinformation problem.
Mozilla researchers, who provided their report to The New York Times, had originally set out to track political advertising ahead of the European elections using the application program interface, or API, that Facebook set up to provide access to the library’s data. They instead ended up documenting problems with Facebook’s library after managing to download the information they needed on only two days in a six-week span because of bugs and technical issues, all of which they reported to Facebook.
