
Facebook under fire as political ads vanish from archive - annapowellsmith
https://www.ft.com/content/e6fb805e-1b78-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4
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annapowellsmith
Article is paywalled, so here are the key bits:

 _Tens of thousands of political ads have gone missing from Facebook’s public
archive less than 48 hours before the British general election, raising fresh
questions over measures introduced to address transparency concerns in online
political advertising...

...On December 5, Facebook’s ad library, which includes adverts shown on its
photo messaging subsidiary Instagram, showed a total of just under 180,000
classified as political in Britain since October 2018. But on Tuesday, that
number had suddenly dropped by a third, to fewer than 120,000 ads.

Facebook declined to say what had caused the issue, or whether the ad data
were irretrievably lost or could be recovered. But a company spokesperson
said: “We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing the ads in the ads
library, and we’re working to fix the issue as soon as possible.”...

...The data lost by Facebook did not appear to be limited to any particular
party or subset — ads were missing from all the main parties’ pages._

