Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016. (Photo: Reuters)
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organizations and journalists to monitor social media posts, in particular to track how misinformation spreads on the company’s platforms.
Wednesday’s shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been met with protest from researchers and nonprofits. In May, dozens of groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Human Rights Watch and New York University’s Center on Social Media and Politics, sent a letter to the company requesting that it keep the tool running at least through January so that it would be available until the U.S. presidential election.
This decision jeopardizes essential pre- and post-electoral 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 states.
CrowdTangle has been an essential tool in helping researchers analyze the vast amount of data on the platform and identify harmful content and threats, he added.
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation sent Meta a similar letter asking it to keep the tool, which was available for free, running until January. That letter was also signed by several dozen groups and individual academic researchers.
“For years, CrowdTangle has represented one of the industry’s best practices for real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how misinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy,” Mozilla’s letter states.
Meta has launched an alternative to CrowdTangle, called Meta Content Library. But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics have also complained that it isn’t as useful as CrowdTangle, at least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post last week that the company has been collecting feedback on Meta Content Library from hundreds of researchers to make it easier to use and help them find the data they need for their work.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: August 15, 2024 | 7:46 a.m. IS
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