Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools — Including Ours

A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers. Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts. … Facebook has also developed another tool that it says will allow researchers to analyze political ads more easily. That tool, called an API, is in “beta” and restricted to a few participants … One researcher with access said the API is not sufficient. It only allows searching by keyword, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University [Tandon School of Engineering] who studies online political advertising. “You can only find ads about things that you already know you’re looking for,” Edelson said. “So any kind of emerging activity is potentially undiscoverable.”