Facebook got 1.3 million new users in August.
Facebook has said that between August 3, 2020, and November 3, 2020, researchers will be able to look at information about 1.3 million social issues, elections, and political ads that ran on the site. This is a big change for Facebook, which used to be hesitant to share this kind of information.
This change comes after academics and other people have asked for years for Facebook ads to be more clear. Up until now, the only information Facebook has shared publicly was about a small number of political ads that ran in the US before the 2016 presidential election.
Researchers who want to find out how Facebook affects elections and other political processes around the world will find the new data dump to be a gold mine. It will also be interesting to people who are worried about how Facebook’s huge reach and a huge amount of data could be used wrongly.
What Facebook is:
Facebook has been reluctant for a long time to let researchers look at the information on its platform. But after years of requests, the company has finally agreed to share information about 1.3 million social issues, elections, and political ads that ran on the platform between August 3, 2020, and November 3, 2020.
This is a big win for academic researchers, who will now have access to a lot of data that can be used to study how social media affects elections and other political events.
The data release comes as lawmakers and the public are putting more pressure on Facebook to make its ad platform more open. It also happens just a few weeks after the company said it would let researchers study how political ads on its platform affect people.
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