Facebook restricted the Political Campaigners ability to check ad's

Facebook restricted the external political campaigners to monitor adverts placed in Social Media or network, in a move repulsive look.

WhoTargetsMe, a British group dedicated to audit adverts on the social network, said that their activities have been severely restricted by recent changes made by Facebook. This change also affected similar US investigative journalism site ProPublica. This affect groups ability to collect data on why users were targeted by political campaigners. The audit tools, who are collecting data on which the users were been asked to install a plugin and collecting data on the ads they see, has helped expose many of the advertising tactics used by politicians, making it harder for those who pay for negative adverts to escape audit.

WhoTargetsMe co-founder Sam Jeffers said that ten day s back their software stopped and to fix it took a lot of effort than normal. He expressed his fear of his service could be in effect of locked out of Facebook. “Facebook is wanted to becloud their code. When we make small changes, they respond with further updates in no time. This comes in a year when over one-third of worlds country are having their general elections in near future. In total, they are trying to stop us from gathering data about the ads they run, and the targeting of those ads. Facebook said the change was part of restricting on third-party plug-ins such as ad blockers accessing unauthorized data from their site, still, 20,000 people who have signed up to WhoTargetsMe have chosen to share their data with the service.

“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plug-ins to keep people’s information safe, This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plug-ins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect,” said Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier.




In Dec 2018, Facebook launched its own political ad archive, which is greatly accepted by campaigners that have resulted in additional auditing of political advertisers on the Facebook including the government and campaign groups. Though the Facebook is slow to give the direct access od new database to journalists and researchers, while it is currently only available in the US, UK, and Brazil – still it plans to roll it out across the EU before parliament elections.

Facebook has insisted its in-house transparency page is industry-leading but Jeffers said it is still “inadequate” as it doesn’t provide meaningful information about why a user is being targeted, or who is ultimately behind such advertising.