Meta, Support CrowdTangle Through 2024 and Maintain CrowdTangle Approach
On 14 March, Meta announced it would abandon CrowdTangle, the tool used by tens of thousands of journalists, watchdogs, and election observers to monitor the integrity of elections around the world. Meta will shut down CrowdTangle on 14 August, without an effective replacement, ahead of elections in the United States, Brazil, and Australia and in the wake of elections in India, South Africa, and Mexico — endangering both pre- and post election monitoring.
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. 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 below signatories call on Meta to:
- Keep CrowdTangle functioning until January 2025.
- Rapidly onboard all current CrowdTangle organizations that are focused on election integrity to the Content Library, including civil society organizations, researchers and qualifying news outlets - directly or through an accelerated application process.
- Engage in regular consultations with the global Crowdtangle community to ensure that the Content Library meets their needs, including maintaining full Crowdtangle functionality, before the tool is deprecated.
- As soon as possible, both the Content Library and CrowdTangle should add data about any election-related labels that are attached to public content by Meta, especially fact-checking and voter-interference.
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. It’s also used by researchers and human rights groups to study war crimes, human rights violations, public health crises and natural disasters. Its dashboards helped people analyze and monitor in real-time the spread and engagement of public content on Facebook and Instagram (and at one point, Reddit and Twitter, too). This in turn helped Meta identify harmful trends and abuse on its platforms.
Unfortunately, Meta has been reducing investment in CrowdTangle and has stopped onboarding new users. For many, the announcement on 14 March was not a surprise.
Meta claims that its the decision to discontinue CrowdTangle is about meeting its regulatory requirements under the EU’s Digital Services Act:
“Our data sharing products are evolving alongside technology and regulatory changes. Phasing out CrowdTangle will allow us to focus resources on our new research tools, Meta Content Library and Content Library API, which provide useful, high quality data to researchers.”
We’re encouraged Meta is investing in the new Content Library — but abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle’s core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency at the heart of the Digital Services Act.
The new Content Library may eventually be an effective replacement or even an improvement on CrowdTangle, but it is not currently fit for purpose as a tool to monitor elections. It lacks vital CrowdTangle features like automated insights to the interface, tools for benchmarking individual pieces of content, robust search flexibility, and more ways to automatically export data. Meta’s new data access program, run through the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), is fundamentally different from CrowdTangle: it is mainly focused on long-term, academic research, available through a clean room environment. In contrast, CrowdTangle’s immense value has been in providing real-time, public data to tens of thousands of public interest researchers, election administration officials and journalists across the world. For instance, in 2020, Meta provided CrowdTangle to election administration officials in all 50 US states to help them monitor for potential election interference or misinformation. They also made public dashboards available so it was easy to see what every major candidate was posting on their platforms. Those sort of resources were invaluable to helping protect the election and are now under threat of disappearing forever.
Furthermore, at time of writing, relatively few researchers have access to the new Content Library: thousands of civil society organizations and journalists currently monitoring Facebook and Instagram through CrowdTangle simply do not have access to the new system, making it even more difficult for them to continue their vital work during elections. Moreover, suggesting that civil society groups and election integrity organizations should pay for expensive alternatives designed for marking & commercial purposes is not a realistic proposal. Abandoning CrowdTangle is essentially a resource allocation issue. Continuing to support CrowdTangle alongside the Content Library would not put Meta at risk of regulatory noncompliance.
In 2024, about 50 countries — approximately half the world’s population — will go to the polls. What we need right now are effective tools to track candidates and political narratives, and to protect people before, during, and immediately following elections, in the moments when false and confusing narratives spread like wildfire, and when disinformation and hate speech can drive physical harm offline.
Meaningful real-time transparency into the spread of online content is vital to protect the integrity of elections. But this transparency is not just a question of what data points are eventually shared - it is about who is given access to transparency tools and how they are empowered to use them.
Signed:
#Jesuislà
7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media
Access Now
Accountable Tech
Africa Digital Democracy Observatory (ADDO)
Africa Freedom of Information Centre (AFIC)
AfroLeadership
AkhbarMeter Media Observatory
Aláfia Lab
AI Forensics
AlgorithmWatch
Alliance4Europe
Almost
Analysis & Numbers
Associação Casa Hacker
Avaaz
Build Up
Brazilian National Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology
Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD)
Center for Democracy and Technology
Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD)
Centre for Peace Studies
Check My Ads
CheckFirst oy
Civil Liberties Union For Europe (Liberties)
Climate Action Against Disinformation
Coalition for Independent Tech Research
Consortium of Ethiopian Human Rights Organizations (CEHRO Ethiopia)
Corporate Europe Observatory
CORRECTIV
Council for Responsible Social Media
Dare to be Grey
Das NETTZ
Debunk.org
Defend Democracy
Demagog Association
Democracy Reporting International
Digital Action
Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam
Digital Rights Foundation (DRF)
Eastern Africa Editors Society
Ekō
Eticas Foundation
EU DisinfoLab
Expert Forum Think Tank, Romania
Fair Vote UK
Faktabaari
Filippo Menczer, Director of Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University
Forum on Information and Democracy
Foundation The London Story
Friends of the Earth
Fundamedios
Fundación InternetBolivia.org
Fundación Maldita.es
GLAAD
Glitch
Global Action Plan
Global Coalition for Tech Justice
Global Voices
GlobalFocus Center
Global Witness
GLOBSEC
GoVote Nigeria
Greek Helsinki Monitor
GuinéeCheck
Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)
Hashtag Generation
Hope and Courage Collective Ireland
Human Rights Monitoring Institute
HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement
Hungarian Civil Liberties Union
ICCL Enforce
INSM, digital rights defender in Iraq
Institute for Strategic Dialogue
Internet Sans Frontières
Internews Ukraine
Jordan Open Source Association
Källkritikbyrån
Lead Stories
The Legal Resources Centre
LoveAid Foundation
Majal.org
médialab Sciences Po, Paris
Meedan
MEMO 98
Mnemonic
Mozilla
Myanmar Internet Project
Myanmar Tech Accountability Network
Myth Detector, Media Development Foundation
Namibia Media Trust
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)
National Network to Combat Disinformation - Brazil
NetLab UFRJ
NepalFactCheck.org
Novi Sindikat, Croatia
Panoptykon Foundation
Panos Institute Southern Africa
Paradigm Initiative
People Vs Big Tech
People's Alliance for Credible Elections
Politiscope EU
Pollicy
Prosocial Design Network
Rappler
Real Facebook Oversight Board
Research ICT Africa
Reset Tech
Rinascimento Green
Science Feedback
Search for Common Ground
Sierra Leone Association of Journalists
SocialTIC
Social Impact and Development Communication Centre
SOLIDAR & SOLIDAR Foundation
Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet)
Tech Global Institute
Tech4Peace
Textgain
The Peace Institute, Ljubljana
The Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya, The Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security-Rongo University
Tattle Civic Technologies
The Tech Oversight Project
TjekDet
University of Cape Coast, Ghana
USC Neely Center
VOST Europe
Waag Futurelab
WHAT TO FIX
Who Targets Me
Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)
Women NGOs Secretariat of Liberia
Xnet, Institute for Democratic Digitalisation
Youth Open Data
Abhishek Kumar, Senior fact-checker and Researcher at Alt News
Asha Phillips, former International News Partnerships lead at CrowdTangle
Alette Schoon, School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa
Archit Mehta, MA CCT/ Researcher at The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University
Bao Truong, Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University
Basile Simon, Starling Lab for Data Integrity, Stanford EE
Baobao Zhang, Syracuse University
Brandon Silverman, Former CEO & Co-Founder of CrowdTangle
Claes de Vreese, University of Amsterdam
Courtney C. Radsch, Director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty
Danishjeet Singh, researcher
David Evan Harris, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Douglas A. Parry, Stellenbosch University
Emma Briant, Monash University
Emre Kizilkaya, Editor, Journo.com.tr
Flavia Durach, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest
Francesco Bailo, Lecturer, University of Sydney
Galyna Petrenko, director at Detector Media NGO
Guy Berger, Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development, UNESCO
Jean le Roux, Digital Forensic Research Lab
Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Syracuse University
Johannes Breuer, GESIS, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Justin Hendrix, CEO and Editor, Tech Policy Press
Kazutoshi Sasahara, Tokyo Institute of Technology, School of Environment and Society
Linda Ngari, Fact-Checking and Data Journalist
Lisa Schirch, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame
Louis Barclay, Founder of Unfollow Everything
Luise Koch, TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
Luiz Eugenio Scarpino Jr, Professor
Manuel Alejandro Baron Romero
Maria Ressa, Nobel laureate
Matthew R. DeVerna, PhD Candidate, Indiana University
Michael Workman, ABC News
Nina Santos, National Institute of Science & Technology for Digital Democracy, Brazil
Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Technical University of Munich
Prateek Waghre, Internet Freedom Foundation, India
Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
Piyush Ghasiya, Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Rebekah Tromble, George Washington University
Richard Rogers, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Robin Monheit, Former North America News Partnerships Lead, CrowdTangle
Simon Kruschinski, Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
Shepi Mati, Lecturer, Rhodes University
If you are an organization, independent researcher, or public interest journalist working on platform integrity, and would like your endorsement to be listed publicly, please email Mozilla's EU Advocacy Lead, [email protected].