SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog groups and journalists to monitor social media posts, particularly to track how disinformation spreads on the company’s platforms.
Wednesday’s closure, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by researchers and nonprofits. Dozens of groups protested in May, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Human Rights Watch, and NYU’s Center for Social Media & Politics has sent a letter to the company asking it to keep the tool available at least until January, so that it would be available until the US presidential election.
“This decision jeopardizes essential pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta’s transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when societal trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile,” the letter said.
CrowdTangle has “proven to be an essential tool in helping investigators sift through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify malicious content and threats,” it added.
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation sent a similar letter to Meta asking it to keep the tool, which was available for free, working until January. That letter was also signed by dozens of groups and individual academic researchers.
“For years, CrowdTangle has represented an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civil discourse and democracy,” the Mozilla letter said.
Meta has released an alternative to CrowdTangle called the Meta Content Library. However, access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics have also complained that it isn’t as useful as CrowdTangle — at least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post last week that the company has collected feedback on Meta Content Library from “hundreds of researchers to make it easier to use and help them find the data they need for their work.”
Meta said Wednesday that CrowdTangle doesn’t provide a complete picture of what’s happening on its platforms and said its new tools are more comprehensive.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.