Facebook disables accounts tied to NYU research project

Political ads on Facebook have been a source of contention for years. The company has a controversial policy against fact-checking political ads, which led to criticism that candidates would pay the company to spread lies through their ads. — AFP

Facebook Inc has disabled the personal accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on the social network, claiming they are scraping data in violation of the company’s terms of service.

The company also cut off the researchers’ access to Facebook’s APIs, technology that is used to share data from Facebook to other apps or services, and disabled other apps and Pages associated with the research project, according to Mike Clark, a director of product management on Facebook’s privacy team.