Meta shuts monitoring tool CrowdTangle

A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year.

Meta will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.

A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.

The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Californian company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organisations will largely not have access to.

For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering ­researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year – a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.

“In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms,” Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said.

“It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency.”

Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content ­Library, a technology still under development. It’s a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, say is not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.

“It’s an entire new muscle” that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Mr Silverman said.

In recent election cycles, ­researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.

By its own admission, Meta, which bought CrowdTangle in 2016, said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state ­officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.

In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them “quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression”. The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone insisted Content Library would contain “more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle” and be made available to academics and non-profit integrity experts.

Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.

Journalists have used CrowdTangle to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.

Meta’s decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with ­pirated content.

AFP