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dead Announce This month and in August, CrowdTangle, the company’s platform monitoring tool, will shut down Bought in 2016. The tool that tracks the best performing links published on Meta platforms is It’s been deprioritized by Meta for years A victim of various internal reorganization efforts.
Meta says CrowdTangle will be replaced by two new tools, Meta Content Library and Content Library API, which the company says “provides useful, high-quality data to researchers.” But the move was also criticized by several online researchers, including Brandon Silverman, co-founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle. Silverman signed on Open letter It was prepared this week by Mozilla, for which it serves as an advisor, asking Meta to reconsider its decision, given the number of elections that will be held around the world this year. Mozilla speech It sparked anger Meta spokesman Andy Stonewho engaged in A Hot back and forth With Silverman on X.
Fast company He spoke to Silverman about his thoughts on CrowdTangle shutting down, and why he believes the Meta alternative is not a proverbial alternative. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What is the founding principle of CrowdTangle?
CrowdTangle was originally founded as a community organizing tool. As is the case with a lot of startups trying to find product-market fit, we ended up stumbling upon a much better opportunity in 2012 and 2013: to help publishers understand the flow of information across Facebook and social media more broadly.
We opened up all these other ideas that pulled back the curtain on the flow of information within social media platforms, which at the time was becoming more important to the publishing world.
In recent years, some might say CrowdTangle has been neuter By limiting new subscriptions and restricting data. Do you think it still serves that purpose today?
We were acquired by Facebook in late 2016. The idea was that this was part of a larger commitment they were making to the entire industry. They actually created an entire news products team that didn’t exist before. Instead of charging for it, they made it free for the entire news industry, and gave us the green light to work with and support as many global news partners around the world as we could.
But one thing happened about two years into our acquisition: We just started receiving more and more requests from outside the news industry, from human rights organizations, civil rights and civil society groups, and election protection groups. These platforms also became really important to the work they were doing. And so, it was about two years after we acquired the company that, instead of just having this founding principle of helping serve the global news industry, we took on this broader mandate of trying to be one of the main ways that Facebook was transparent with the outside world about What happens on the platform.
What do you think of Meta’s decision to close it?
It is not surprising. I think a lot of us who followed this closely had a sense that we were becoming less interested in providing that kind of transparency. When I left, two years ago, one of my big takeaways and lessons from my entire experience was that private companies and tech platforms were never going to go far when it came to their transparency efforts.
I actually give Mita a lot of credit. They invested in us and gave us a lot of resources to do this work. By the time I left, I think there was disagreement about how much Facebook wanted to move forward with this business. But also, there’s been very little effort put into the rest of the industry, and one of my main takeaways is that we’re going to make a lot of progress in this whole area, through volunteer efforts.
We’ve already made a lot of progress in Europe in terms of the Digital Services Act, so-called Article 40. There’s a provision that’s sometimes called the “CrowdTangle provision” because it took some of the model that we built and said, “Hey, this should be one of the ways we ask companies to be transparent.” I think Meta probably would have shut down CrowdTangle sooner without this regulation. I don’t think they would have built a replacement.
Do you think the replacement tools they offer do the same thing as CrowdTangle?
I think there are some things in the meta content library that are much better than CrowdTangle. At its core, its infrastructure has the potential to provide a more comprehensive and robust solution. It also has some data points that we didn’t have. But there are also some missing data points.
Then there’s also a lot of lost functionality. One of the key things I’ve learned after 10 years of this work is, if you’re trying to provide meaningful transparency, if you’re really trying to support civil society groups, electoral projects, organizations, you can’t throw away what is basically an endless amount of data on their plates and expect them to To be able to do anything with it. The functionality and usability of data is in some ways as important as the amount of data you have. This is where the content library is lacking.
That’s why you waded in more Andy Stone comments.
Yes. One of the things you mentioned is who has access and what does that look like? I think a content library could be quite an alternative. But for now, that won’t happen, and it won’t happen by August 14. That’s why I think many election groups are concerned, especially during a year in which we know how many important elections are being held and where we know of misinformation and disinformation. It will likely be a problem.
What worries you that this year could go wrong without CrowdTangle?
There are three things that worry me most. The first is content generated by artificial intelligence. Parts of Facebook are already starting to fill up with comments and AI-generated content, and I don’t think we know exactly what impact that might have on the election.
The second reason is that many of these platforms have reduced their investments in election integrity work. Many people who have worked on the integrity, trust and safety teams within these platforms are concerned that a lot of the work they have seen is not having an impact anymore.
The third question is, listen, I’m an American citizen. We are about to replay the last presidential cycle in which one candidate — and much of the media system supporting him — regularly spread doubt about the election results in a way that ultimately led to violence. In our Capitol; More importantly, it has undermined the public credibility of the entire Biden administration because of the number of Republicans who believe he was not “elected.” I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that it won’t happen again.
We know these things happen. It seems we want to more Eyes help alleviate those problems, no less.
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