Anika Begay
Journalists, researchers and politicians are mourning Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which it used to track the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
In place of CrowdTangle, Meta offers its Content Library, but limits its use to people from “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions conducting scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from using the tool.
Those who have used the Meta Content Library say that it is less transparent and accessible, has fewer features, and offers a worse user experience.
Many in the community have written open letters to Meta in protest. They question why the company would eliminate a useful tool for combating misinformation three months before the most contentious U.S. election in history, an election already threatened by the proliferation of AI deepfakes and chatbot misinformation, some of which originated with Meta’s chatbot, and replace it with a tool that academics say is simply not as effective.
In short, if it ain’t broken, why fix it?
Meta didn’t provide many answers. At an MIT Technology Review conference in May, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg was asked why the company wouldn’t wait to shut down CrowdTangle until after the election. He called CrowdTangle a “degrading tool” that doesn’t provide complete and accurate information about what’s happening on Facebook.
“It measures just a narrow slice of a pie of a pie, which is a particular form of engagement,” Clegg said at the time. “It literally doesn’t tell you what people are seeing online.”
His rhetoric paints CrowdTangle as an almost recklessly bad tool that Meta allows to exist. This is in stark contrast to Meta’s 2020 promotion of the platform as a source provided to Secretaries of State and election commissions across the country to help them “rapidly identify misinformation, voter interference, and suppression” and create “customized public Live Displays for each state.”
Today, Meta’s hard line is that the Content Library provides more detailed information about what people are actually seeing and experiencing on Facebook and Instagram. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the new tools offer a more comprehensive data collection experience, now including media from Reels and page view counts. The spokesperson said MCL will soon include Threads content, too, and noted that CrowdTangle data has been weighted toward accounts with very large followings and engagement.
Some researchers accustomed to the old tool disagree that CrowdTangle was inadequate. They would also point out that the accounts with the most engagement are exactly the ones they want data on, since they are clearly the most influential.
“[MCL has]only 10% of CrowdTangle’s usability,” saidCameron HickeyCEO of the National Conference on CitizenshipaTechCrunch. He emphasized that CrowdTangle was “a sophisticated quasi-commercial product” with its own business before Facebook acquired it in 2016. Under the Facebook umbrella, the tool only improved when the team integrated the recommendations of the functions lity from a broad user base Hickey helped write a report comparing features on the two platforms co-published by Proof News and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Journalism School[MCLhas}only10%oftheusabilityofCrowdTangle”CameronHickeyCEOoftheNationalConferenceonCitizenshiptoldTechCrunchHepointedoutthatCrowdTanglewas“asophisticatedquasi-commercialproduct”withitsownbusinessbeforeFacebookacquireditin2016UndertheFacebookumbrellathetoolonlyimprovedastheteamonboardedfeaturerecommendationsfromalargepoolofusersHickeyhelpedauthorareportthatcomparesthefeaturesonthetwoplatformsco-publishedbyProofNewsandtheTowCenterforDigitalJournalismatColumbia’sJournalismSchool[MCLha}soloil10%dell’usabilitàdiCrowdTangle”hadettoCameronHickeyCEOdellaNationalConferenceonCitizenshipaTechCrunchHasottolineatocheCrowdTangleera”unsofisticatoprodottoquasicommerciale”conunapropriaattivitàprimacheFacebookloacquisissenel2016Sottol’ombrellodiFacebooklostrumentoèmiglioratosoloquandoilteamhaintegratoleraccomandazionidellefunzionalitàdaunampiobacinodiutentiHickeyhacontribuitoascrivereunrapportocheconfrontalefunzionalitàsulleduepiattaformeco-pubblicatodaProofNewsedalTowCenterforDigitalJournalismpressolaColumbia’sJournalismSchool[MCLhas}only10%oftheusabilityofCrowdTangle”CameronHickeyCEOoftheNationalConferenceonCitizenshiptoldTechCrunchHepointedoutthatCrowdTanglewas“asophisticatedquasi-commercialproduct”withitsownbusinessbeforeFacebookacquireditin2016UndertheFacebookumbrellathetoolonlyimprovedastheteamonboardedfeaturerecommendationsfromalargepoolofusersHickeyhelpedauthorareportthatcomparesthefeaturesonthetwoplatformsco-publishedbyProofNewsandtheTowCenterforDigitalJournalismatColumbia’sJournalismSchool
Hickey said that Meta’s content library offers some of the same data as CrowdTangle, but ultimately only “1% of the functionality.”
“If you wanted to look at the number of followers that CNN’s Facebook page has had over time, that’s something you can’t do in the Meta Content Library, but you can do in CrowdTangle,” Hickey said. “And indicators like that are often very useful for understanding how an actor’s social media prevalence or visibility changes over time, and connecting that to other things, like what if they made a viral post and then suddenly their total number of followers doubled?”
Some of the features present on both platforms, such as tracking how often political parties post on certain topics and seeing their engagement, are simply more tedious to use on MCL, Hickey says, which is indicative of poor user experience design.
Basically, while people might be able to access data, say on posts that mention immigration, what they can do with that data is significantly more limited.
“You can’t create the kinds of interactive charts that were available with CrowdTangle,” Hickey said. “You can’t create public dashboards.”
(A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that on August 14, the day CrowdTangle shut down, the company launched a configurable real-time dashboard feature to allow users to quickly view post feeds and trending graphs based on specific keywords and manufacturers.)
“And most importantly,” Hickey continued, “you can’t download every post.”
Users can only download posts from accounts that have more than 25,000 followers, but many politicians are well below that limit.
“This leaves many researchers with very few options, and one of the few that remains is the one that presents some complications, which is direct data extraction,” Hickey said.
Another major issue with MCL is that Meta does not grant access to controllers who previously used CrowdTangle to monitor the spread of misinformation.
Media Matters, a nonprofit journalism watchdog, told TechCrunch it does not have access to MCL today. The organization has previously used CrowdTangle to demonstrate that, contrary to right-wing media and Republican talking points, Facebook is not actually censoring conservative information.
In fact, right-facing pages saw significantly more engagement on their content than non-aligned or left-facing pages, research director Kayla Gogarty told TechCrunch.
“CrowdTangle has given us the ability to see the types of content that are being broadly engaged with on the platform,” Gogarty said. “Algorithms are usually a black box, but having at least some of that engagement data could help us learn a little bit more about algorithms.”
Gogarty noted that before the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, researchers and journalists had used the tool to raise the alarm about online organizing and the potential for violence to delegitimize elections.
“What this will ultimately mean is that fewer civil society groups will be able to monitor and track what happens on Facebook and Instagram in this election year,” Brandi Geurkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, told TechCrunch.
Hickey contrasted Meta, which spent time and likely millions of dollars creating the Content Library, with Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter (now X). When Musk bought Twitter, he immediately restricted access to the Twitter API, which allows developers, journalists, and researchers to access and analyze data from the platform in a similar way to CrowdTangle. Now, the cheapest enterprise X API package is priced at $42,000 per month and provides access to just 50 million posts.
This article has been updated with additional information from Meta.
