Journalists, researchers and politicians have lamented Meta's shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
In place of CrowdTangle, Meta offers a content library, but its use is limited to people at “qualified academic institutions or non-profit organizations conducting scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from accessing the tool.
Those who use meta content libraries say they offer less transparency and accessibility, fewer features, and poor user experience design.
Many in the community have written open letters of protest to Meta, questioning why the company would remove a tool to help combat misinformation three months before the most contentious U.S. election in history, which is already threatened by AI deepfakes and the spread of misinformation through chatbots, some of which originates from Meta's own chatbots, and replace it with a tool that academics say is simply ineffective?
I mean, if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Meta hasn't offered many answers. At the MIT Technology Review conference in May, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of international operations, was asked why the company waited until after the election to shut down CrowdTangle. He called it a “degrading tool that doesn't provide complete and accurate information about what's going on on Facebook.”
“This only measures a narrow slice of a cake, a particular form of engagement,” Clegg said at the time. “You literally have no idea what people are looking at online.”
His rhetoric makes it clear that CrowdTangle is a tool that is so bad it's almost reckless for Meta to allow to exist. This is in stark contrast to how in 2020 Meta promoted the platform as a resource to help secretaries of state and elections officials across the country “rapidly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression” and create custom “state-by-state public live displays.”
Now, Meta's hardline stance is that its content library will provide more detailed insights into what people are actually viewing and experiencing on Facebook and Instagram. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the new tool offers a more comprehensive data collection experience.
Some researchers who were used to the older tools disagree.
“That's just 10% of CrowdTangle's usability,” Cameron Hickey, CEO of the National Civic Congress, told TechCrunch. He noted that CrowdTangle was a “sophisticated quasi-commercial product” with its own business before it was acquired by Facebook in 2016. Under Facebook, the tool has further improved as the team incorporates feature recommendations from its many users. Hickey helped write a report published jointly by Proof News and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University's journalism school that compares the features of the two platforms.
Hickey said Meta’s content library offers some of the same data as CrowdTangle, but ultimately it’s only “1% of its functionality.”
“If you want to see how many followers CNN's Facebook page has over time, you can't do that in the Meta Content Library, but you can in CrowdTangle,” Hickey says. “Metrics like these can be really useful for understanding how an actor's social media visibility or prominence has changed over time and tying that together with other things, like if their follower count suddenly doubled after a post went viral.”
The study by Proof News, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and Algorithmic Transparency Institute details how Meta Content Library's features compare to CrowdTangle, which Meta shut down on Wednesday. Image credit: TechCrunch | Proof News, Tow Center for Journalism, Algorithmic Transparency Institute
Hickey points out that some of the features common to both platforms, such as tracking how often political parties post on certain topics and seeing relative engagement, are simply cumbersome on MCL and represent a poorly designed user experience.
The key point is that even if people have access to the data (for example, about posts that mention immigration), they are very limited in what they can do with it.
“You can't create interactive charts like you could with CrowdTangle,” Hickey says, “you can't create public dashboards, and most importantly, you can't download all the posts.”
Users can only download posts from accounts with more than 25,000 followers, but many politicians fall far short of that number.
“This leaves many researchers with few options, and one of the only options left is the complex process of scraping the data directly,” Hickey said.
Another big problem with MCL is that Meta doesn't allow access to watchdog agencies that previously used CrowdTangle to track the spread of misinformation.
Media Matters, a nonprofit journalism watchdog group that told TechCrunch it doesn't currently have access to MCL, has previously used CrowdTangle to show that, contrary to claims by right-wing media and Republicans, Facebook doesn't actually censor conservative content.
In fact, right-leaning pages see significantly more engagement with their content than non-right-leaning or left-leaning pages, research director Kayla Gogarty told TechCrunch.
“CrowdTangle gives us insight into what content is getting widespread engagement on the platform,” Gogarty says. “Algorithms are typically a black box, but having at least some of that engagement data helps us understand them a little better.”
Gogarty noted that ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, researchers and reporters had used the tool to sound the alarm about online organizing and the potential for violence to delegitimize the election.
“What this ultimately means is that in an election year, there will be fewer private entities able to monitor and track what's going on on Facebook and Instagram,” Brandi Gerkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, told TechCrunch.
Hickey contrasted Meta, which has spent time and likely millions of dollars building its content library, with Elon Musk's actions at Twitter (now X). As soon as Musk acquired Twitter, he restricted access to the Twitter API, which allows developers, journalists, and researchers to access and analyze the platform's data in a similar way to CrowdTangle. Today, the cheapest enterprise X API package costs $42,000 per month and provides access to only 50 million posts.