CDT Joined Call for Facebook to Rescind Cease and Desist Demand for Ad Observer
On October 28, 2020, the Center for Democracy & Technology joined an open letter calling for Facebook to rescind its cease and desist demand for the New York University’s Ad Observer plugin, a tool that allows Facebook users to volunteer to contribute information about the ads and ad targeting they encounter on the platform.
Voting has already begun in one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history. More than ever before in American politics, the members of the public need to know who is trying to influence them and how.
Yet at this critical moment for the country, Facebook has threatened to shut down an independent research effort studying political ad targeting on the platform. In a cease + desist letter, Facebook directed New York University to shut down its Ad Observer browser plug-in, a tool that allows Facebook users to volunteer to contribute information about the ads and ad targeting they encounter on the platform. Facebook also demanded that the project delete all the data it has collected.
Ad Observer allows journalists and researchers to better understand the political misinformation and manipulation that spreads daily on your platform. It has been a resource for substantive reporting on the upcoming election, used by dozens of newsrooms, from Florida to Utah, from outlets like the Houston Chronicle and Missouri Independent to Buzzfeed and The Markup.
Facebook claims its motive for threatening Ad Observer is that browser plugins and extensions, like Ad Observer, could violate Facebook users’ privacy. But Ad Observer only collects information about the ads people see, not personal posts or users’ personal information. What is true is that the Ad Observatory project has revealed serious flaws in Facebook’s advertising transparency policies.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
The norms of conversational advertising are being written right now by companies. Policy should be written alongside them, and it should start with recognizing that surreptitious manipulation at scale built on intimate information is itself a privacy harm, and a privacy law can, in part, solve some of those issue
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
