INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016
| (Photo: Reuters)2 min read Last Updated : Aug 15 2024 | 7:46 AM IST
Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has shut down
CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organisations and journalists to monitor social media posts, notably to track how
misinformation spreads on the company's platforms.
Wednesday's shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by
researchers and nonprofits
In May, dozens of groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council,
Human Rights Watch and NYU's Center for Social Media - Politics, sent a letter to the company asking that it keep the tool running through
at least January so it would be available through the US presidential elections.
This decision jeopardizes essential pre- and
post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta's transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when social trust
and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile, the letter said.
CrowdTangle, has been an essential tool in helping researchers parse
through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify harmful content and threats, it added.
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla
Foundation sent Meta a similar letter asking it to keep the tool, which was available for free, functioning until January
That letter was also signed by several dozen groups and individual academic researchers.
For years, CrowdTangle has represented an
industry best practice for real-time platform transparency
It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic
discourse and democracy," the Mozilla letter said.
Meta has released an alternative to CrowdTangle, called the Meta Content Library
But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations
Critics have also complained that it's not as useful as CrowdTangle -- at least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs,
said in a blog post last week that the company has been gathering feedback about Meta Content Library from hundreds of researchers in order
to make it more user-friendly and help them find the data they need for their work.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.(Only the headline
and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a
syndicated feed.)First Published: Aug 15 2024 | 7:46 AMIST
