Researchers studying Facebook misinformation say they were deplatformed

<i>We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people&#x27;s privacy</i><p>It&#x27;s not really unauthorized if people installed the pluggin for the express purpose of providing the researchers with data about the ads they received and how their personal information may have gotten them targeted for those ads. Given IRB requirements, that would have to have been made clear to users as well. Not like the click-wrap &quot;I agree&quot; buttons Facebook and other use to keep knowledge what users are giving to them opaque.

&gt;&gt; But the far right and far left media ecosystems are &quot;fundamentally different,&quot; Edelson said, with 40% of the media sources cited on the far right actively spreading false information. In other corners of the media ecosystem and other partisan groups, this number doesn&#x27;t go above 10%.<p>how are they quantifying this? Or is there link to other sources on this?

Is it safe to say censorship, deplatforming, shadowbans, unbanking, watchlisting, and unpersoning is pretty much normalized, and now everyone can just say, &quot;it is what it is,&quot; and imagine they aren&#x27;t going to be caught up in the next wave?

don&#x27;t violate the TOS if you want to use a platform for your research<p>also based on Edelson statement this research seems to be heavily biased before it even completed, favoring one political wing statements as &quot;true&quot; vs. another as &quot;false&quot;, probably not much scientific value was there in the first place

This is a private company. As a company they also have freedom of speech. Government should not interfere. They should be free to curate their own platform. You can create your own facebook... -HN after Trump was banned, or after NoNewNormal was banned by reddit<p>It is amazing how fast the narrative changes, based on how people agree or disagree with the censored group in question. Do people notice they are behaving this way?

I&#x27;m skeptical that the &quot;far right&quot; spreads misinformation more than the &quot;far left&quot;. I think that may reflect the bias of the researchers.