Meta removes misinformation tracker CrowdTangle. Critics claim its replacement has only ‘1% of the features’

Journalists, researchers, and politicians are lamenting Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram.

Replacing CrowdTangle, Meta is offering its own content library — but access is restricted to people at “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions conducting scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from accessing the tool.

Those who are using the Meta Content Library say that it is less transparent and accessible, has fewer features, and has poor user experience design.

Many in the community have written open letters to Meta in protest. They question why the company removed a useful tool for combating misinformation three months before the most contentious US election in history — an election already threatened by the spread of AI deepfakes and chatbot misinformation, some of which came from Meta’s own chatbots — and replaced it with a tool that academics say is not as effective.

In short, if it ain’t broke why fix it?

Meta hasn’t provided many answers. At the MIT Technology Review conference in May, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, was asked why the company didn’t wait to shut down CrowdTangle until after the election. He called CrowdTangle an “abusive tool” that doesn’t provide a complete and accurate view of what’s happening on Facebook.

“It only measures a small piece of the cake, which is a particular form of engagement,” Clegg said at the time. “It doesn’t really tell you what people are looking for online.”

His rhetoric paints CrowdTangle as an almost casually bad tool for Meta. This is in stark contrast to Meta’s promotion of the platform in 2020 as a source provided to secretaries of state and election boards across the country to help them “quickly identify misinformation, voter interference, and suppression” and create custom “public live displays” for each state.

Today, Meta’s strict policy is that the Content Library provides more detailed information about what people actually see and experience on Facebook and Instagram. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the new tools provide a more comprehensive data aggregation experience, now including multimedia and page view counts from Reels. The spokesperson said MCL will soon incorporate Threads content as well, and pointed out that CrowdTangle’s data was weighted toward accounts with a very large number of followers and engagement.

Some researchers who were used to the old tool disagree that CrowdTangle was inadequate. They also point out that the accounts with the most engagement are the ones they need data on, because they are clearly the most influential.

“[MCL’s]usefulness is only 10% of CrowdTangle’s usefulness,” Cameron Hickey, CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship, told TechCrunch. He pointed out that CrowdTangle was “a sophisticated semi-commercial product” that had its own business before being acquired by Facebook in 2016. The tool only improved under Facebook’s umbrella as the team incorporated feature recommendations from a larger number of users. Hickey helped write a report comparing features on both platforms co-published by ProofNews and the Lito Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s School of Journalism.[MCLhas}only10%oftheusabilityofCrowdTangle”CameronHickeyCEOoftheNationalConferenceonCitizenshiptoldTechCrunchHepointedoutthatCrowdTanglewas“asophisticatedquasi-commercialproduct”withitsownbusinessbeforeFacebookacquiredin2016UndertheFacebookumbrellathetoolonlyimprovedastheteamonboardedfeaturerecommendationsfromlargepoolofusersHickeyhelpedauthorareportthatcomparesthefeaturesonthetwoplatformssco-publishedbyProofNewsandtheTowCenterforDigitalJournalismatColumbia’sJournalismSchool[एमसीएलकीउपयोगिता}क्राउडटैंगलकीउपयोगिताकाकेवल10%है।”उन्होंनेबतायाकिक्राउडटैंगल”एकपरिष्कृतअर्ध-वाणिज्यिकउत्पाद”थाजिसका2016मेंफेसबुकद्वाराअधिग्रहणकिएजानेसेपहलेअपनाखुदकाव्यवसायथा।फेसबुककीछत्रछायामेंटूलमेंकेवलसुधारहुआक्योंकिटीमनेबड़ीसंख्यामेंउपयोगकर्ताओंसेफीचरअनुशंसाओंकोशामिलकिया।हिकीनेएकरिपोर्टलिखनेमेंमददकीजोदोनोंप्लेटफ़ॉर्मपरसुविधाओंकीतुलनाकरतीहैजिसेप्रूफ़न्यूज़औरकोलंबियाकेजर्नलिज्मस्कूलमेंडिजिटलजर्नलिज्मकेलिएटोसेंटरद्वारासह-प्रकाशितकियागयाहै।[MCLhas}only10%oftheusabilityofCrowdTangle”CameronHickeyCEOoftheNationalConferenceonCitizenshiptoldTechCrunchHepointedoutthatCrowdTanglewas“asophisticatedquasi-commercialproduct”withitsownbusinessbeforeFacebookacquireditin2016UndertheFacebookumbrellathetoolonlyimprovedastheteamonboardedfeaturerecommendationsfromalargepoolofusersHickeyhelpedauthorareportthatcomparesthefeaturesonthetwoplatformsco-publishedbyProofNewsandtheTowCenterforDigitalJournalismatColumbia’sJournalismSchool

Meta’s content library offers some of the same data as CrowdTangle, but ultimately only provides “1% of the features,” Hickey said.

“If you want to look at how many followers CNN’s Facebook page has gained over time, that’s something you can’t do in the Meta Content Library, but you can do in CrowdTangle,” Hickey said. “And those kinds of indicators are often very useful for understanding how an actor’s prevalence or prominence on social media changes over time, and connecting them to other things, like, did they make a viral post and then suddenly their total number of followers doubled?”

Hickey says some features that exist on both platforms – such as tracking how often political parties post on a topic and seeing relative engagement – ​​are more difficult to do on MCL, pointing to poor user experience design.

Importantly, even if people can get access to data – for example, about posts that mention immigration – what they can do with that data is severely limited.

“You can’t create interactive charts like those available with CrowdTangle,” Hickey said. “You can’t create public dashboards.”

(A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that on August 14, the day CrowdTangle ended, the company launched a configurable real-time dashboard feature allowing users to instantly display post feeds and trend charts based on certain keywords and producers.)

“And most importantly,” Hickey added, “you can’t download all the posts.”

Users can only download posts from accounts that have more than 25,000 followers, but many politicians have far fewer followers than that number.

“This leaves researchers with very few options, and one of the options that remains is one that has complexities, and that is to scrape the data directly,” Hickey said.

Another main problem with MCL is that Meta is not providing access to watchdogs who previously used CrowdTangle to track the spread of misinformation.

Media Matters, a nonprofit monitoring journalism organization, told TechCrunch that it did not have access to MCL today. In the past, the organization used CrowdTangle to show that Facebook was not actually censoring conservative information, contrary to the views of right-wing media and Republicans.

In fact, right-wing pages received significantly more engagement on their content than non-aligned or left-wing pages, research director Kayla Gogarty told TechCrunch.

“CrowdTangle has given us the ability to see what kind of content is widely engaged with on the platform,” Gogarty said. “Algorithms are usually a black box, but having at least some of that engagement data can help us learn a little bit more about the algorithms.”

Gogarty said that before the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, researchers and journalists used the tool to warn about online organizing and the potential for violence to delegitimize the election.

“This will ultimately mean that fewer civil society groups will be able to monitor and trace what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram during this election year,” Brandi Geerkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, told TechCrunch.

Hickey compared Meta, which spent time and possibly millions of dollars to build a content library, with Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter (now X). When Musk bought Twitter, he immediately limited 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 costs $42,000 per month, and provides access to only 50 million posts.

This article has been updated with more information from Meta.