Karissa is a senior reporter at Engadget, covering Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Snap and all things social media. Her interests include tech policy, internet culture, and all the ways our online activities shape our IRL selves.
The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups are pushing back on Meta’s decisions to shut down its research tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. In an, the group calls on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after 2024 elections, saying that it will harm their ability to track election misinformation in a year where “approximately half the world’s population” are slated to vote.
The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups as well as the former CEO of CrowdTangle, comes one week after Meta confirmed it wouldthe tool in August 2024. “Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record,” the letter writers say.
“This means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It’s a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.” The group asks Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025, and to “rapidly onboard” election researchers onto its latest tools.
CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. It allows researchers, journalists and other groups to track how content is spreading across Facebook and Instagram. It’s also often cited by journalists in unflattering stories about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget reliedin an investigation into why Facebook Gaming was overrun with spam and pirated content in 2022.
The other issue, according to Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s former CEO who left Meta in 2021 is that the Meta Content Library isn’t currently powerful enough to be a full CrowdTangle replacement. “There are some areas where the MCL has way 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 postlast week.
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