Researchers at New York University are tracking the myriad ways political advertisers use Facebook to target consumers with their campaign ads. Facebook doesn't like the research and has issued a stern cease-and-desist warning — which raises troubling questions about the social-media platform's much-touted commitment to transparency in the upcoming election. Facebook, apparently, is all for information-sharing unless the information being shared involves Facebook itself. The research should continue with renewed vigor, whether Facebook likes it or not.

In the last presidential election, Facebook allowed itself to be used as a disinformation portal by bad actors, both foreign and domestic, who took advantage of the platform's wide reach and loose rules to manipulate the voting public. Russian operatives under one Kremlin agency alone reached millions of U.S. Facebook users while posing as domestic organizers of Confederate rallies and initiatives like "Kids for Trump," according to special counsel Robert Mueller's report last year on Russia's election interference.

Under fire, Facebook has created an archive showing details about who paid for each political ad and when it ran. However, the company doesn't reveal information about how the ads are targeted to specific types of Facebook users — crucial information, given that pinpoint-targeting of these ads to specific demographics was a key strategy of the election trolls last time.

So researchers at NYU's engineering school last month launched a project called the Ad Observatory, using more than 6,500 volunteers and a special program that collects data about the campaign ads those volunteers receive. Not only is the project unveiling information about consumer targeting practices that Facebook has declined to make public, the research has also discovered ads that were supposed to be in Facebook's public archive yet aren't — holes in Facebook's own transparency system, in other words.

Facebook acknowledges the project has improved its public ad library, but the company is nonetheless threatening legal action if the research doesn't stop. The company's argument, incredibly, is that it violates the privacy of those 6,500 volunteers by analyzing the ads they're receiving — volunteers who have agreed to have their accounts analyzed. More likely, Facebook is trying to protect its highly secret algorithms and methods of tracking user interests.

As The Wall Street Journal first reported last week, Facebook is giving the researchers until the end of November before initiating "additional enforcement action." That deadline would protect the project through the election, but that's not good enough.

One of the few areas of bipartisan agreement in Congress these days is that Facebook and other Big Tech giants have consolidated too much media power in too few hands; talk of corporate breakups and other federal action is becoming common. Facebook should think hard about whether this is the time to quash independent research examining publicly available data on its site — especially when the goal of that research is to protect the sanctity of future elections.

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