The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups are pushing back against Meta's decisions to shut down its research tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. in a The group is calling on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after the 2024 election, saying it will hurt its ability to track election misinformation in a year when “about half the world's population” is scheduled to vote.
The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups, as well as the former CEO of CrowdTangle, comes a week after Meta confirmed that it would launch the tool in August 2024. “Meta's decision will effectively ban the world outside, including electoral integrity experts. , seeing what is happening on Facebook and Instagram, during the most important election year on record,” the letter writers say.
“This means that almost all external efforts to identify and prevent political misinformation, incitement to violence and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. “It is a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of the elections.” The group calls on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025 and to “rapidly onboard” election researchers to its latest tools.
CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. It allows researchers, journalists and other groups to track how content spreads on Facebook and Instagram. Journalists also often quote him in unflattering stories on Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied on an investigation into why Facebook Gaming was overrun with spam and pirated content in 2022. CrowdTangle was also the source of “”, a Twitter bot (now defunct) that posted daily updates on the most engaged Facebook posts containing links. The project, created by a New York Times reporter, regularly showed overperforming conservative and far-right pages, leading Facebook executives to argue that the data was not an accurate representation of what was on the platform.
With CrowdTangle about to shut down, Meta highlights a new program called , which provides researchers with new tools to access publicly accessible data in a simplified way. The company has said it is more powerful than what CrowdTangle enabled, but it is also much more tightly controlled. Researchers at academic and nonprofit institutions must apply and be approved for access. And since the vast majority of newsrooms are for-profit entities, most journalists will automatically be ineligible for access (it's unclear whether Meta would allow reporters in nonprofit newsrooms to use the content library).
The other problem, according to Brandon Silverman, former CEO of CrowdTangle who left Meta in 2021, is that the metacontent library is currently not powerful enough to completely replace CrowdTangle. “There are some areas where MCL has a lot more data than CrowdTangle ever had, including reach and feedback in particular,” Brandon Silverman, former CEO of CrowdTangle who left Meta in 2021, wrote in a post. last week. “But there are also huge gaps in the tool, both for academics and civil society, and simply arguing that it has more data is not a claim that regulators or the press should take seriously.”
In a sentence Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that “academic and nonprofit institutions conducting scientific or public interest research can request access” to the Meta content library, including nonprofit election experts. “The metacontent library is designed to contain more complete data than CrowdTangle.”
