Researchers Rally Against Meta's CrowdTangle Shutdown, Citing Risks to Election Monitoring Efforts

A collective comprising researchers is actively advocating for the preservation of the platform. They argue that the discontinuation of CrowdTangle poses a significant risk to ongoing research efforts across various domains.

Urging Meta to Prolong CrowdTangle's Availability

The Mozilla Foundation and many research and advocacy groups are voicing their dissent against Meta's decision to cease its research tool, CrowdTangle, later in the current year.

Through an open letter directed at Meta, the collective implores the company to extend CrowdTangle's availability beyond the 2024 elections, stressing the critical necessity of continuous access for monitoring election-related misinformation.

This call comes amidst anticipation of extensive global voter participation, highlighting the urgency of preserving tools for scrutinizing online discourse during this pivotal period.

Crafted by the Mozilla Foundation and backed by a coalition of 90 organizations alongside the former CEO of CrowdTangle, the missive is a direct response to Meta's recent announcement regarding the discontinuation of CrowdTangle by August 2024.

The letter highlights Meta's decision's repercussions and the obstruction it poses to external observers, including election integrity advocates, hindering their ability to oversee activities on Facebook and Instagram.

This setback is particularly concerning amidst the impending wave of one of history's most extensive election cycles.

This action effectively silences almost all external efforts aimed at identifying and preventing political disinformation, incitement to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities. It represents a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.

The group requests that Meta keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025 and rapidly onboard election researchers onto its latest tools.

Meta has harbored long-standing frustrations with CrowdTangle, a tool researchers, journalists, and various groups utilize to monitor the spread of content across Facebook and Instagram.

Critical stories about the two social media platforms have often referenced it.

For instance, Engadget relied on CrowdTangle for an investigation into the proliferation of spam and pirated content on Facebook Gaming in 2022. Additionally, CrowdTangle served as the data source for Facebook's Top 10, a now-defunct Twitter bot.

This bot regularly highlighted the most interacted with Facebook posts containing links. However, its findings often showcased far-right and conservative pages outperforming others, prompting Facebook executives to challenge the accuracy of the data in reflecting actual platform trends.

Transitioning to Meta Content Library

As CrowdTangle's closure looms, Meta is shifting attention to its latest initiative, the Meta Content Library. This new program aims to offer researchers enhanced tools for accessing publicly available data more efficiently.

While Meta claims it to be more robust than CrowdTangle, it imposes stricter controls. Access to the Meta Content Library is restricted to researchers affiliated with nonprofits and academic institutions, necessitating an application and approval process.

Consequently, most journalists working in for-profit newsrooms will be ineligible for access. Whether Meta would extend usage privileges to reporters associated with nonprofit news outlets remains uncertain.