Faced with a rising backlash over the spread of disinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, Facebook last year came up with a seemingly straightforward solution: It created an online library of all the advertisements on the social network.

Transparency, it decided, was the best disinfectant.

Ads would stay in the library for seven years, letting ordinary users see who was pushing what messages and how much they were paying to do it. Facebook gave researchers and journalists deeper access, allowing them to extract information directly from the library so they could create their own databases and tools to analyze the ads — and ferret out disinformation that had slipped past the social network’s safeguards.

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