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Facebook has apologized to disinformation researchers for providing them with erroneous and incomplete data for their work examining how users interact with posts and links on its platform, the New York Times reported. Contrary to what the company told researchers, the data Facebook provided apparently only included information for about half of its users in the United States, not all.
The Times reported that members of Facebook’s open research and transparency team called the researchers on Friday to apologize for the error. Some of the researchers questioned whether the error was intentional to sabotage the research, or simply a case of negligence.
The data breach was first discovered by a researcher at the Italian University of Urbino, who compared a report published by Facebook in August to the data it provided only to researchers. The datasets did not match, according to the Times.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The edge Saturday, but a spokesperson told the Times that the error was the result of a technical error and that the company “proactively informed the affected partners and is working quickly to resolve” the problem.
The August 18 report that the Urbino University researcher used in his comparison was released for the sake of “transparency,” showing the most viewed content in Facebook’s public news feed between April and June. of this year, its second trimester. However, the Times found that Facebook had put aside a report from its first quarter that portrayed the company in a much less flattering light. Facebook eventually released the shelved report.
Also in August, Facebook banned academic researchers from New York University’s Ad Observatory project from its platform, after the group’s Ad Observer browser plug-in highlighted problems. His research found that Facebook had not disclosed who paid for certain political ads on its site.
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