Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook's platform. The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. A...