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The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups oppose Meta’s decisions to shut down its search tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. in the group is calling on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after the 2024 elections, saying that would hurt its ability to track election misinformation in a year in which “nearly half the world’s population” is scheduled to vote.
The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups as well as CrowdTangle’s former CEO, comes one week after Meta confirmed it would be the tool in August 2024. “Meta’s decision will effectively ban the outside world, including election integrity experts.” “From seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram – during the biggest election year ever,” the letter’s authors say.
“This means that virtually all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitement to violence, and harassment of women and minorities online will be silenced. It is a direct threat to our ability to maintain the integrity of elections.” The group asks Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025, and “rehabilitate researchers.” In the field of elections quickly” using the latest tools.
CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. It allows researchers, journalists, and other groups to track how content spreads across Facebook and Instagram. Journalists also often cite it in unflattering stories about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied on an investigation into why spam and pirated content took over Facebook Gaming 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 was created by A. The New York Times The reporter regularly showed that far-right and conservative pages were overperforming, leading Facebook executives to say the data wasn’t an accurate representation of what was on the platform.
With the closure of CrowdTangle, Meta is instead highlighting a new program called , which provides researchers with new tools to access publicly accessible data in a streamlined way. It’s more powerful than what CrowdTangle has made available, but it’s also subject to stricter oversight, the company said. Researchers from non-profit organizations and academic institutions must apply and be approved in order to access it. Since the vast majority of newsrooms are for-profit entities, most journalists will automatically be ineligible for access (it’s not clear whether Meta will allow journalists in nonprofit newsrooms to use the content library).
The other problem, according to Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of CrowdTangle who left Meta in 2021, is that Meta’s content library is not currently robust enough to be a full CrowdTangle replacement. “There are some areas where MCL has much more data than CrowdTangle ever had, including reach and comments in particular,” Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of CrowdTangle who left Meta in 2021, wrote in a post. last week. “But there are also some huge gaps in the tool, both for academics and civil society, and just saying it contains more data is not a claim that regulators or the press should take seriously.”
In the current situation Meta spokesman Andy Stone said that “academic institutions and nonprofits seeking to conduct scholarly or public interest research can apply for access” to the meta content library, including nonprofit election experts. “The Meta Content Library is designed to contain more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle.”
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