Facebook is providing academic researchers with a massive data haul revealing how political ads during last year’s U.S. elections were targeted to people on the platform. However, researchers have been held up by an arduous process to access the data and worry the information is insufficient to provide meaningful analysis of how Facebook’s ad platform was used —and potentially misused — leading up to the election. “You need to see what’s going on in order to know how to regulate something,” said Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, an interdisciplinary center for research to help inform government policy addressing how digital technologies affect society. Papakyriakopoulos said he has applied to access the new Facebook 2020 political ad data, made available in February, but has yet to receive it.