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.”
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