Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely utilized by researchers, watchdog organizations and journalists to observe social media posts and, specifically, to trace how misinformation spreads on the corporate’s platforms.
Wednesday’s shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this 12 months, was protested by researchers and nonprofits. 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 & Politics, sent a letter to the corporate asking it to maintain the tool running until at the very least January so it could be available by the point of the U.S. presidential election.
“This decision jeopardises essential control mechanisms before and after the elections and undermines Meta’s efforts to ensure transparency at this critical stage and at a time when social trust and digital democracy are frighteningly fragile,” the letter said.
CrowdTangle is “an important tool that has helped researchers analyze the vast amounts of information on the platform and identify malicious content and threats,” it said.
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation sent Meta the same letter asking it to maintain the free tool operational until January. That letter was also signed by several dozen groups and individual academic researchers.
“CrowdTangle has been an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency for years. It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook and undermine civic discourse and democracy,” the Mozilla letter said.
Meta has released a substitute for CrowdTangle, the Meta Content Library, but access to it is restricted to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics also say the library shouldn’t be as useful as CrowdTangle – at the very least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s President for Global Affairs, said in a Blog post last week that the corporate has collected feedback on the Meta Content Library from “hundreds of researchers to make it more user-friendly and help them find the data they need to do their work.”
Meta said Wednesday that CrowdTangle doesn’t provide an entire picture of what is occurring on its platforms, saying its recent tools are more comprehensive.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.
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