Facebook is coming under fire for botching its much-touted ad transparency tool.
Back in February, the company promised to release an ad archive API, which it duly launched last month. Allowing users to carry out customised keyword searches of ads, revealing 'all active and inactive ads related to politics or issues of importance'.
Now, though, Mozilla has carried out an evaluation of the tool, and says it succeeds on only two of five fronts identified by a group of sixty academics.
"The fact is, the API doesn’t provide necessary data. And it is designed in ways that hinders the important work of researchers, who inform the public and policymakers about the nature and consequences of misinformation," says the firm.
First, says Mozilla, the API is only searchable by keywords, rather than providing all ad data that can be filtered by specific criteria.
"And since you cannot download data in bulk and ads in the API are not given a unique identifier, Facebook makes it impossible to get a complete picture of all of the ads running on their platform (which is exactly the opposite of what they claim to be doing)," says the firm.
Second, the API provides no information on targeting criteria or engagement data, so that researchers can't see what types of users an advertiser is trying to influence, and whether or not their attempts were successful.
"It seems more likely that Facebook doesn’t want to release information on targeting as it would likely embarrass [it] and their customers," says Michael Veale, a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, one of the co-authors of the report Veale said in the report.
"It is also possible that Facebook has confidentiality agreements with specific advertisers who may be caught red-handed for practices that go beyond public expectations. Data protection law isn’t blocking the disinfecting light of transparency, Facebook is."
Manwhile, says Mozilla, the API severely limits what researchers can do, meaning it could take 'months' to evaluate ads in a certain region or on a certain topic.
The company only gives Facebook a pass on the provision of up-to-date and historical data access, along with the fact that it's available to the general public.
Mozilla is calling on the EU to 'carefully scrutinize the tool’s shortcomings.' - and, indeed, its criticisms echo concerns raised recently by the European Commission.
With the EU elections fast approaching, the Commission recently praised Facebook, Google and Twitter for starting to lable political advertisements on their platforms.
"In particular, Facebook and Twitter have made political advertisement libraries publicly accessible, while Google's library has entered a testing phase. This provides the public with more transparency around political ads," commissioners said in a statement.
"However, further technical improvements as well as sharing of methodology and data sets for fake accounts are necessary to allow third-party experts, fact-checkers and researchers to carry out independent evaluation."
The spotlight will fall next on Google, which has promised an ad API some time in the next few weeks.
