Meta attempted to discredit researchers who identified fraudulent ads on its platforms

Meta's external lawyers attempted to discredit researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) who reported failures and negligence in moderating ads on its main platforms, Facebook and Instagram, according to government documents obtained by Nucleo.

A research report produced by NetLab, a lab that monitors and studies social media, was used by Di Senacon, a federal consumer issues watchdog, to first notify Meta and then fine it in November 2023.

At the time, the research group showed that the company had removed no more than 1,800 paid advertisements containing scams using the name of a popular government debt relief program called Desenrola, even after an official notification months earlier, in July 2023, demanded the content be removed.

In response to the fine imposed on Senacon, which was mainly based on the study, the platform accused the UFRJ team of being “biased” and not acting “technically”.

The official document attacking the researchers – called administrative defense – was signed by the TozziniFreire law firm on December 26, 2023. It is part of the case opened by Senacon against the social network, which is still ongoing, the agency said.

Nucleo obtained the document through freedom of information requests from Senacon.

In its defense, Meta describes Netlab as a “partial third party” that “could never produce neutral technical evidence.”

The platform accuses NetLab's report of containing “a series of imperfections, biased responses, distorted conclusions and questionable reliability at best”, without explaining what these errors or distortions were.

“Netlab has an institutional political view clearly opposed to Facebook Brasil (the legal name of Meta in Brazil),” the company argued. “And not only that: the laboratory coordinator herself, Professor Rose Marie Santini, has publicly expressed strong criticism of digital platforms,” the defense said, citing as a source an interview in which the researcher explained how networks profit from extremism.

Global strategy

One of the country's top social media experts, Marie Santini, the group's coordinator and main target of criticism, says defamation of scientists has become a “global strategy” of Big Tech to try to silence critics in universities.

In the United States, the social network went so far as to ban researchers from accessing data after committing an act that did not please the company.

“They say that our methodologies are invalid or biased because they want their advertising clients to only use the metrics and analyzes that they create themselves,” explains the UFRJ professor.

Senacon says Nucleo that NetLab cooperates with the agency to “provide support in administrative sanctions processes, thanks to its technical expertise in the matter”.

“Senacon emphasizes that the laboratory provided significant technical support for the investigation of the cases,” according to an emailed statement.

Nucleo contacted Meta and TozziniFreire, but they declined to comment.

One of Meta's arguments to discredit the group is that NetLab's report did not contain links to each of the 1,817 ads identified as fraudulent. The UFRJ group, however, shared with Nucleo the spreadsheets used in its studies with the URLs and identifiers of each ad.

“This is a strategy to make us work for them, given that they have already made money from an ad, and this request shifts the responsibility to us to clean up their platform,” Santini said.

“They never talk about data or evidence, but they want to express an opinion about me or my research lab,” she says.

Report by Pedro Nakamura
Art by Heloisa Botelho
Edited by Alexandre Orrico