Researchers are asking Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after the 2024 election

The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups are pushing back against Meta’s decisions to shut down its research tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. In an the group is calling on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after the 2024 election, saying it would harm their ability to track election disinformation in a year when “roughly half the world’s population” is slated to vote.

The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups as well as CrowdTangle’s former CEO, comes one week after Meta confirmed it would use the tool in August 2024. “Meta’s decision will effectively bar the outside world, including election integrity experts, seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year in history,” the letter’s authors say.

“This means that almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitement to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced.” This is a direct threat to our ability to protect the integrity of elections. The group is asking Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025 and to “rapidly onboard” election researchers to its latest tools.

CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for the Meta. It allows researchers, journalists and other groups to track how content is distributed on Facebook and Instagram. It is also often cited by journalists in unflattering stories about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied on an investigation into why Facebook Gaming was inundated with spam and pirated content in 2022. CrowdTangle was also the source of “”, a (now defunct) Twitter bot that posted daily updates of the most engaged Facebook posts containing links. The project created by a New York Times reporter, regularly showed far-right and conservative pages overrepresented, prompting Facebook executives to argue that the data was not an accurate representation of what was on the platform.

As CrowdTangle is set to shut down, Meta is instead highlighting a new program called , which provides researchers with new tools to access publicly available data in a streamlined way. The company said it’s more powerful than what CrowdTangle enables, but it’s also much more tightly controlled. Researchers from non-profit organizations and academic institutions must apply and be approved to access it. And since the vast majority of newsrooms are for-profit organizations, most journalists will automatically be ineligible for access (It’s unclear whether Meta will allow reporters at nonprofit newsrooms to use the content library.)

The other problem, according to Brandon Silverman, former CrowdTangle CEO who left Meta in 2021, is that the meta content library is not currently powerful enough to be a full replacement for CrowdTangle. “There are some areas where MCL has far more data than CrowdTangle ever had, including reach and comments in particular,” Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s former CEO, who left Meta in 2021, wrote in a post. last week. “But there are also some huge gaps in the tool, both for academia and civil society, and simply saying that there is more data is not a claim that regulators or the press should take seriously.”

In a statement , Meta spokesman Andy Stone said “academic and nonprofit institutions engaged in scholarly or public research may apply for access” to the Meta content library, including nonprofit election experts. “The meta content library is designed to contain more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle.”