Meta Platforms Inc. on Wednesday shut down CrowdTangle, a popular social media analytics tool that journalists, civic groups and researchers used to monitor trending posts on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in real time.
The timing of the tool’s shutdown, months before a key U.S. presidential election, has raised concerns among groups that relied on CrowdTangle to track the flow of information on social media, including viral falsehoods that caused real-world harm. CrowdTangle allowed journalists and researchers to show how many users engaged with a piece of content, which groups accelerated a post’s spread, and how often political and medical misinformation went viral on Facebook and Instagram.
In July, a bipartisan group of politicians sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking him to delay the shutdown of CrowdTangle for six months. The company “has a responsibility to ensure that the public, independent researchers, journalists and politicians can study and address the impacts of the platforms and their algorithms,” it said in a response to that letter earlier this week. Meta said it was continuing to shut down CrowdTangle because the tool was “difficult to maintain” and “did not provide a representative picture of what happens on our platforms.”
The company said it still plans to replace CrowdTangle with the Meta Content Library, a new tool that Meta says will include richer data, such as the ability to analyze comments. Researchers affiliated with nonprofit institutions must apply for access to the library through a third-party and Meta partner, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. News publishers and other groups with commercial interests, however, are barred from using the tool, which has been criticized as an inadequate replacement for CrowdTangle. An analysis by Proof News cited 11 features, including the ability to view social media metrics over time and share dashboards, that the Meta Content Library lacked compared to CrowdTangle when used for research purposes.
Asked for comment on CrowdTangle’s closure, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a November blog post in which the company announced its new Meta Content Library tool.
Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, called Meta’s response “disappointing” in separate statements, and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said it “only underscores the need for greater oversight and control of Big Tech companies.”
Founded in 2011, CrowdTangle quickly gained popularity with media clients such as BuzzFeed, CNN, Vox and NBC because its app allowed it to track trending posts on social media platforms. Five years later, Meta acquired the tool, made it free and expanded access to other media outlets. Soon, reporters and researchers were using the tool to investigate topics as diverse as Russian influence operations, misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and the QAnon conspiracy movement.
Journalists’ use of the tool also shed light on the high level of involvement of Facebook and Instagram users in inflammatory conspiracy theories. In 2021, Meta executives clashed over the issue of data transparency and how much the social network should disclose about popular content on its platform. In July of this year, The New York Times reported that the CrowdTangle team within Meta was being disbanded. Meta also withdrew other initiatives, including a $40,000 grant to help research partners use CrowdTangle data to understand public discussion about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Until CrowdTangle was shut down, Meta maintained a list of dozens of case studies showing how researchers used the tool to, for example, identify Russian-linked influence operations in Africa or track down misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine.
In 2022, Bloomberg reported that Meta had begun an official internal process to shut down CrowdTangle. Although the company’s executives recently described the tool’s closure as necessary because it was “degrading,” the company had already previously allocated dwindling resources to the product, Bloomberg reported. As of mid-2022, fewer than five engineers from Facebook’s London integrity team were tasked with keeping CrowdTangle afloat.
In their letter to Meta, the lawmakers pointed out that the Meta Content Library only provides a view of the platform at the time a search is conducted, which would make it difficult for researchers to reproduce a search or study conducted by someone else. The lawmakers also noted that the restriction “limits and complicates researchers’ ability to study what happens on the platform.” That could make it harder for researchers to, for example, study the origins and spread of election-related misinformation on Facebook and Instagram over time.
Fabio Giglietto, an associate professor of Internet studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo in Italy, said he expected many researchers to express disappointment at the demise of CrowdTangle. “The alternative is not yet fully developed,” Giglietto said, citing difficulties in running queries on the tool in the virtual environment it requires. “This is particularly frustrating for those who have successfully navigated the overly complex application process and cumbersome setup,” he said.
Meta’s decision to shut down CrowdTangle also comes amid relaxed content moderation policies and information integrity efforts across all social media platforms.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media – a nonprofit coalition of major advertisers formed in 2019 to push tech platforms to adopt stricter content moderation policies – ceased operations last week after Elon Musk accused the group of staging a boycott against the platform. The Stanford Internet Observatory, which focuses on election integrity, was also disbanded after a sustained campaign by Republicans to discredit research institutions and their investigations into political influence campaigns on social media platforms.
Davey Alba, Bloomberg News
