US FTC slams Facebook's reasons for banning US researchers as inaccurate

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday slammed social media platform Facebook's justification for banning third-party researchers from the New York University on its platform as "inaccurate." FTC Acting Director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection Samuel Levine also complained to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding the ban. The social media platform had banned the personal accounts and platform access associated with researchers from New York University. They claimed that the ban was for violating its terms of service by scraping user data without permission.

"Had you honoured your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest," Levine wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg.

"While I appreciate that Facebook has now corrected the record, I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter," Levine added. Firefox browser also slammed the platform for the ban saying its claims "simply do not hold water".

However, earlier this week, Facebook reasoned the ban saying, "NYU's Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorised means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our Terms of Service. We took these actions to stop unauthorised scraping and protect people's privacy in line with our privacy programme under the FTC Order."

"We disabled the accounts, apps, Pages and platform access associated with NYU's Ad Observatory Project and its operators after our repeated attempts to bring their research into compliance with our Terms," it added.