Meta's controversial CrowdTangle shutdown sparks outcry amid misinformation battle

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has shut down CrowdTangle—a tool used by a huge cross-section of users, ranging from researchers to watchdog organisations and journalists, notably to track how misinformation spreads on the company's platforms.

Wednesday's shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by researchers and nonprofits. Back in May, dozens of groups — including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Human Rights Watch, and NYU's Center for Social Media & Politics — sent a letter to the company asking that it keep the tool running through at least January, so it would be available during the US presidential elections.

'This decision jeopardises essential pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta's transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile,' the letter said.

'CrowdTangle has been an essential tool in helping researchers parse through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify harmful content and threats,' it added.

In March, a nonprofit called the Mozilla Foundation sent Meta a similar letter urging it to commit to keeping the tool, available for free, up and running until at least January. Several dozen groups and individual academic researchers also signed onto that letter.

'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 civic discourse and democracy,' the Mozilla letter said.

Meta has published an alternative, the Meta Content Library, but access is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which means it's unavailable to most news organisations. Other critics have complained that it isn't as useful as CrowdTangle — not yet, at least.

According to a blog post last week by Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, the company has been collecting feedback about Meta Content Library from "hundreds of researchers in order to make it more user-friendly and help them find the data they need for their work."

Meta said Wednesday that CrowdTangle doesn't provide a complete picture of what is happening on its platforms and said its new tools are more comprehensive.