According to researchers at New York University a yearlong analysis of Facebook’s Ad Library has revealed “significant systemic flaws” in the way the platform monitors and enforces its political ad rules.  Detailed study found that some $37 million worth of ads did not accurately disclose who was paying for them.

Researchers Laura Edelson, Tobias Lauringer, and Damon McCoy found more than 86,000 Facebook Pages that ran political ads with the misleading disclosures, the report states. More than 19,000 ads appeared to be paid for by “likely inauthentic communities,” with groups of Pages promoting near-identical images or messages targeted at swing state voters.

The inauthentic ads used “disinformation tactics similar to those employed by the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency,” including targeting readers by race, gender, union membership or veteran status,” the report states. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge in an email that “our authorization and transparency measures have meaningfully changed since the research was conducted,” adding that the social media platform offers “more transparency into political and issue advertising than TV, radio or any other digital ad platform

The vulnerabilities in Facebook’s ad system could have allowed “a malicious advertiser to avoid accurate disclosure of their political ads,” the researchers found.

The social media company said that it was “committed to creating a new standard of transparency and authenticity for advertising.” The update to the online repository,  made all Facebook’s active ads publicly available for review for seven years, including information about who paid for the ad and how much. Researchers and journalists were given access that allowed them to analyze information about ads in the library.

Facebook says it’s reviewing the Pages mentioned in the NYU researchers’ report. When a Page hides its ownership to mislead people, Facebook requires additional information and a verification process for the page to remain active. Fewer than 10 percent of ads its current Ad Library ran without the required disclaimers, but all were eventually labeled, the company says.

The NYU researchers recommended Facebook “take on a more active role” in improving its Ad Library security, but praised the platform for taking steps toward better transparency, calling it “the only [ad library] that provided enough data to meaningfully study. Google doesn’t include issue advertising, and Twitter’s transparency center lists only a few hundred advertisers, compared to 126,000 pages with transparent political ads provided by Facebook.”