FTC official raps Facebook for booting political ads probe

By MARCY GORDON
AP Business Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Federal Trade Commission official is criticizing Facebook’s move to shut down the personal accounts of two academic researchers and terminate their probe into misinformation spread through political ads on the social network. In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the FTC official says the company wrongly used a 2019 data-privacy settlement with the agency to justify shutting down the New York University researchers’ accounts this week. Facebook maintained that the researchers violated its terms of service and were involved in unauthorized data collection from its massive network.