According to The Markup (a non-profit news organization behind Citizen Browser), Facebook quietly made changes to News Feed to interfere with browser-based tools used journalists and researchers.
According to the report Facebook has been adding junkcode to HTML features that are meant to improve accessibility for visually impaired people. This code may also prevent browsers from automatically collecting information about posts in News Feed and could hinder screen readers used by visually impaired and blind users.
The Markups Citizen Browser and New York Universitys Ad Observer have been affected by the change. This extension has been used to help researchers study vaccine misinformation and political ads. Researchers are increasingly using browser-based tools to research issues such as ad targeting or misinformation. These tools allow users to make posts from their feeds accessible to journalists and academics. Researchers claim that this is the only way to get important information about the News Feed.
Facebook made a change in their DOM last Saturday that broke Ad Observer as well as @themarkup’s Citizen Browser and screen readers for the visually impaired. It only impacted us for a week, but screen readers can't be fixed as easily./1 pic.twitter.com/svN6B9BEIM Laura Edelson (@LauraEdelson2) September 21, 2021
Laura Edelson, lead researcher for NYUs Cybersecurity for Democracy which runs Ad Observer, stated that Facebook's changes caused Ad Observer to be broken, though they were able find a workaround.
A Facebook spokesperson stated that they were investigating the claims. The spokesperson stated that while we make constant code changes across all of our services, we have not made recent code changes to prevent these research projects from being completed. While our accessibility features appear to be functioning as usual, we are still investigating claims of disruptions.
This code change is just the latest spat between Facebook and researchers, who claim that Facebook has hindered them in their attempts to understand what's going on on its platform. The company removed the personal Facebook accounts from NYU researchers who were working with Ad Observer last month. They claimed they had violated the privacy rules of the company. (Facebook later refuted by the FTC for misleading comments regarding its reasons for these actions.
The changes have other implications. Edelson and The Markup point out that the changes could have an impact on screen readers, which is an important accessibility technology. The code could cause screen readers to miss some of the junk characters, as they have cited at least one example. Some ad blocking programs may also have been affected by the changes.
