The end of an era for social media research. Meta shut down CrowdTangle, an analytics tool that for years has helped tens of thousands of researchers, journalists and civil society groups understand how information spreads on Facebook and Instagram.
For a company never known for being transparent about its internal workings, CrowdTangle was an “indispensable” resource for those looking to learn about the Meta platform, says Brandi Geurkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “It was one of the only windows anyone had into how these platforms worked,” Geurkink told Engadget. “The fact that CrowdTangle is free and available to such a wide range of people working on public interest journalism and research makes it an invaluable tool.”
Over the years, CrowdTangle has provided an amazing amount of research and reporting on public health, disinformation, elections, and the media. According to Google Scholar, his data has been cited in thousands of journal articles. News agencies used the tool to track elections and changes publishing industry. It also provides unparalleled insight into Facebook itself. For years, CrowdTangle data has been used by journalists to track the origins of viral misinformation, hoaxes and conspiracy theories on the social network. Engadget relied on CrowdTangle to detect massive amounts of spam on Facebook Gaming.
The meta wasn’t always as anti-transparency as it is now. The company acquired CrowdTangle in 2016 and has encouraged journalists, researchers and other civil society groups to use its data over the years. Facebook regularly provided training to academics and newsrooms highlighted research projects based on their concepts.
But the story started to change in 2020. At this time a New York Times reporter created an automated Twitter bot called “Facebook Top Ten”. It used CrowdTangle data to share top Facebook pages based on engagement. At the time, right-wing figures and news outlets such as Dan Bongino, Fox News and Ben Shapiro regularly dominated the lists. The Twitter account, which has tens of thousands of followers, has been frequently cited in the long-running debate over whether Facebook’s algorithms are fueling political polarization in the United States.
Meta has repeatedly denied these claims. Its leaders argued that token—the number of likes, shares, or comments a post receives—is not an accurate representation of its overall reach on a social network. In 2021, Meta began publishing its reports.widely viewed” content on its platform. Those reports were offered it’s spam Despite what researchers have raised, it is often more prevalent than political content important questions about how these conclusions were reached.
Recently, Meta executives suggested that CrowdTangle was never intended for research. “It was built for a completely different purpose,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs. he said earlier this year. “It just doesn’t remotely tell you what’s happening on Facebook at any given time.” Brandon Silverman, founder of CrowdTangle, criticized Meta’s decision to shut down the service ahead of the global election. Fast Company said it was originally intended as a community organizing tool, but quickly evolved into a service “to help publishers understand the flow of information on Facebook and social media more broadly.”
According to Alice Marwick, senior research fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, Clegg’s explanation is a “retcon.” “We were trained at CrowdTangle by people who worked at Facebook,” Marvik tells Engadget.
CrowdTangle has instead offered a new set of tools for Meta researchers called the Meta Content Library. This allows researchers to access information about public posts on Facebook and Instagram. It is also more tightly controlled than CrowdTangle. Researchers must apply and go through a screening process to access the data. Although tens of thousands of people have access to CrowdTangle, only “several hundred” researchers are reported to have been released to the Meta Content Library. Journalists can’t even apply unless they’re part of a nonprofit newsroom or partner with a research institute.
There are also advocates from the research community, including the former CEO of CrowdTangle raised questions On whether the Meta Content Library is powerful enough to replicate the functionality of CrowdTangle. “Researchers have told me anecdotally [that] For searches that generate hundreds of results on CrowdTangle, the Meta Content Library has less than 50 results,” says Geurkink. “A question has arisen as to what data source the Meta Content Library is actually taken from.”
Meta chose to shut down CrowdTangle less than three months before the US presidential election, despite pressure from election groups and a letter. legislators The delay request is especially telling. Ahead of the 2020 election, CrowdTangle is a dedicated center for monitoring election-related content and presented its tools to state election officials.
But Marwick notes that there is a wider backlash against research on social media platforms. X not anymore has a free API and has made its data prohibitively expensive for all but the most well-funded research institutions. The owner of the company also sued two small non-profit organizations that conducted research he disagreed with.
“Most of these platforms don’t have any preference to allow researchers to obfuscate their data, because we often find things that aren’t good for PR, that don’t fit the image of the platform they want us to believe.”
While CrowdTangle never provided a complete picture of what goes on at Facebook, it provided an important window into the social network used by billions of people around the world. That window is now slammed shut. While researchers and advocates worry about the immediate impact this election cycle, the implications are bigger and more far-reaching. “The impact is bigger than just this year or the election,” says Geurkink. “When you think about a platform that’s so important in terms of where people get sources of information on a wide range of topics, it’s crazy to think that no one outside of the company understands that.”
