Journalists, researchers, and regulators are up in arms after Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, shut down a tool used to track the spread of misinformation known as CrowdTangle on Wednesday.
According to the Mozilla Foundation, more than 60,000 people have signed letters and petitions calling on Meta to wait another six months before shutting down the tool.
With the election less than three months away, opponents of Meta’s move to axe CrowdTangle, which includes the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Human Rights Watch, and New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, expressed concern in a letter that it “undermines Meta’s transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile.”
“This obstruction poses a severe risk to the efforts of civil rights groups, activists, journalists, and election officials to identify and mitigate political misinformation, incitements of violence, and the online targeting of vulnerable communities,” the letter states. “It stands as a formidable barrier to the preservation of electoral integrity and the information ecosystem, which Meta has repeatedly purported to care deeply about.”
A coalition of 17 lawmakers has also expressed concern about how the journalists and others will be able to track the spread of misinformation and incitement of violence during this election cycle.
Created in 2011, CrowdTangle is a tool used by journalists and researchers to track trends in real-time. It was particularly useful in identifying security threats and misinformation.
Meta bought CrowdTangle in 2016, and journalists, researchers, and regulators found it to be useful in tracking the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, QAnon conspiracy theories, and Russian influences in the presidential election.
In its place, Meta unveiled the Meta Content Library, but its access is limited to academic researchers and nonprofit organizations. Most news organizations will no longer have access to the Meta Content Library.
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Brandi Geurkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, told NPR that as “sufficient” as CrowdTangle is in tracking trends, “they hardly fill the gaping hole that is left by CrowdTangle’s shutdown.”
The Coalition for Independent Technology Research created a website Tuesday called “RIP CrowdTangle,” which commemorates the work researchers, journalists, and watchdogs were able to achieve with the tool.
