Facebook has blocked a team of New York University (NYU) researchers studying political ads and COVID misinformation from accessing its site, a move that critics say is meant to silence research that makes the company look bad. The researchers from the NYU Ad Observatory launched a tool last year to collect data about the political ads people see on Facebook. About 16,000 people installed the browser extension, which enables them to share data with the researchers on what ads they are shown and why those ads were targeted at them. However, Facebook stated the tool was “an unauthorised means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our terms of service," disabling the…