A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle is to be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected fire hose of political misinformation.
The tech giant said CrowdTangle would no longer be available after Aug. 14, less than three months before the US election.
The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations would largely not have access to.
Photo: AFP
For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year — a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.
“In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms,” said Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency,” Smith added.
Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.
It is a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman, say is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of artificial intelligence-enabled falsehoods.
“It’s an entire new muscle” that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman said, calling for “openness and transparency.”
Researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities in the past few election cycles, including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.
By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.
In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them “quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression.”
The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.
Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.
“Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle’s core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency,” said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.
The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a “direct threat” to the integrity of elections, it added.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter’s claims are “just wrong,” as the Content Library would contain “more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle” and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.
Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, does not plan to make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.
Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises, as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.
Meta’s decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.
CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped “hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies,” said Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, including Agence France-Presse, are to have access to the Content Library.
However, other researchers and nonprofits would have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives.
Two researchers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.
“While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it’s not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle’s functionality — will,” said Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita. “It has generated a lot of concerns.”
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday vowed that those behind bogus flood control projects would be arrested before Christmas, days after deadly back-to-back typhoons left swathes of the country underwater. Scores of construction firm owners, government officials and lawmakers — including Marcos’ cousin congressman — have been accused of pocketing funds for substandard or so-called “ghost” infrastructure projects. The Philippine Department of Finance has estimated the nation’s economy lost up to 118.5 billion pesos (US$2 billion) since 2023 due to corruption in flood control projects. Criminal cases against most of the people implicated are nearly complete, Marcos told reporters. “We don’t file cases for
Ecuadorans are today to vote on whether to allow the return of foreign military bases and the drafting of a new constitution that could give the country’s president more power. Voters are to decide on the presence of foreign military bases, which have been banned on Ecuadoran soil since 2008. A “yes” vote would likely bring the return of the US military to the Manta air base on the Pacific coast — once a hub for US anti-drug operations. Other questions concern ending public funding for political parties, reducing the number of lawmakers and creating an elected body that would
A feud has broken out between the top leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on whether to maintain close ties with Russia. The AfD leader Alice Weidel this week slammed planned visits to Russia by some party lawmakers, while coleader Tino Chrupalla voiced a defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The unusual split comes at a time when mainstream politicians have accused the anti-immigration AfD of acting as stooges for the Kremlin and even spying for Russia. The row has also erupted in a year in which the AfD is flying high, often polling above the record 20 percent it
‘ATTACK ON CIVILIZATION’: The culture ministry released drawings of six missing statues representing the Roman goddess of Venus, the tallest of which was 40cm Investigators believe that the theft of several ancient statues dating back to the Roman era from Syria’s national museum was likely the work of an individual, not an organized gang, officials said on Wednesday. The National Museum of Damascus was closed after the heist was discovered early on Monday. The museum had reopened in January as the country recovers from a 14-year civil war and the fall of the 54-year al-Assad dynasty last year. On Wednesday, a security vehicle was parked outside the main gate of the museum in central Damascus while security guards stood nearby. People were not allowed in because
RSS