Facebook under fire as political ads vanish from archive
ft.com
ft.com
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.