Facebook blocks access to NYU research on political ad targeting

Facebook Inc. has deactivated the accounts and access to the platform of a New York University research project, ultimately shutting off a study of the social media giant's political targeted advertisements.

The engineering faculty of the university created The NYU Ad Observatory , in which almost 6500 volunteers applied for an unique browser extension to collect data on political advertisements they see on FB.

As Facebook did not authorize for the experiment to the researchers, Facebook suspended the project's and its operators' accounts, applications, Facebook pages, and platform access on Tuesday.