New York Times, July 25, 2019
Laura Edelson is a doctoral student in the department of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon.
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. … “One could just call it broken,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who has spent months trying to use the library to build her own database of political advertising in the United States. … “This is not like a problem that technology hasn’t solved and they’re really trying to do their best,” said Ms. Edelson, the N.Y.U. researcher. “No, that’s not what is going on. These are fixable problems.”