San Francisco — Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organizations, and journalists to monitor social media posts, particularly to track how misinformation spreads on the company’s platforms.
Researchers and nonprofits have protested the Wednesday shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year. In May, dozens of groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Human Rights Watch, and New York University’s Center for Social Media, protested the site’s closure. & Politics, sent a letter to the company asking it to keep the tool up until at least January so it would be available during the US presidential election.
“This decision puts at risk essential oversight mechanisms before and after elections and undermines Meta’s transparency efforts during this critical period, at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile.” letter He said.
She added that CrowdTangle was “a key tool in helping researchers analyze the vast amount of information on the platform and identify malicious content and threats.”
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation sent a similar letter to Meta asking it to keep the tool, which was available for free, running until January. That letter was also signed by dozens of groups and individual academic researchers.
“For years, CrowdTangle has represented industry best practices when it comes to real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how misinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civil discourse and democracy,” according to a Facebook press release. Mozilla message He said.
Meta has released an alternative to CrowdTangle, called Meta Content Library. But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics have also complained that it’s not as useful as CrowdTangle — at least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, said in a statement: Blog post Last week, the company gathered feedback on the Meta Content Library from “hundreds of researchers in order to make it easier to use and help them find the data they need for their work.”
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.
