Researchers | claim that | Facebook | is interfering with their ability to | study the News Feed.

  According to The Markup, the nonprofit journalism group behind Citizen Browser, Facebook stealthily implemented changes to News Feed that are "interfering" with browser-based tools used by journalists and researchers.

   To make HTML functions more accessible for visually challenged users, Facebook has begun adding "garbage code." Screen readers used by the blind and visually challenged may also be hindered as a result of the resulting code, which prohibits browsers from automatically gathering data about News Feed posts.

  In addition to The Markup's Citizen Browser, researchers at New York University have been using an add-on called Ad Observer to track political advertisements and vaccination disinformation. For researchers looking into issues like ad targeting and misinformation, browser-based tools like these are becoming increasingly relevant. Researchers claim that these technologies, which allow users to make the postings from their feeds available to researchers and journalists, are one of the only ways to acquire vital data on how the News Feed operates.

    Last Saturday, Facebook made a change to their DOM that had the effect of breaking Ad Observer, as well as @themarkup's Citizen Browser, and most importantly, 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

  Ad Observer's principal researcher, Laura Edelson, of NYU's Cybersecurity for Democracy, said Facebook's adjustments "broke Ad Observer," but they were able to find a workaround.

  In a statement, a Facebook representative said the company was "investigating" the claims. Although the spokesperson said they were constantly updating their services' code, they did not make any recent code changes to prevent these research projects from moving forward. As far as we can tell, our accessibility features are working normally. However, we are looking into the reported disruptions.

 The code change is the latest in a series of spats between Facebook and researchers who claim the social media giant is impeding their efforts to better understand what's happening on its platform. Personal Facebook accounts of NYU researchers working with Ad Observer were deactivated by the company last month after they were found to have violated the company's privacy rules. (The FTC subsequently reprimanded Facebook for making "misleading" comments about the reasons for its actions.)

 The modifications have additional ramifications. Screen readers, a critical accessibility technology, may be impacted by the changes, as The Markup and Edelson point out. A screen reader did read out some of these "junk" characters in one instance, according to the code, at least. Some adblockers may have had issues as a result of the changes.