Researchers explain why they believe Facebook mishandles political ads – NPR

Facebook has worked for years to revamp its handling of political ads — but researchers who conducted a comprehensive audit of millions of ads say the social media company’s efforts have had uneven results. The problems, they say, include overcounting political ads in the U.S. — and undercounting them in other countries. And despite Facebook’s ban on political ads around the time of last year’s U.S. elections, the platform allowed more than 70,000 political ads to run anyway, according to the research team that is based at the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy and at the Belgian university KU Leuven. Their research study was released early Thursday. They also plan to present their findings at a security conference next August. After analyzing more than 4.2 million political and 29.6 million non-political ads from more than 215,000 advertisers, the researchers said that in Facebook’s enforcement efforts on U.S. political ads, “61% more ads are missed than are detected worldwide, and 55% of U.S. detected ads are in fact non-political. ” Researcher criticizes Facebook’s use of ‘rudimentary’ methods Laura Edelson of NYU, a lead author of the study, says two things that emerged from the research surprised her. “One is this very high…
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