Meta Tool slams CrowdTangle, ‘compromising critical post-election surveillance’
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Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms closed CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, monitoring organizations and journalists to monitor posts on social networks, especially to track how wrong information spreads on company platforms.
Wednesday’s closure, announced by Meta earlier this year, has been protested by researchers and non-profit organizations. In May, a number 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 it to keep the tool running. until at least January to be available for the US presidential election.
“This decision jeopardizes important pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta’s efforts to be transparent at this critical time, and at a time when public trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile,” the letter said.
CrowdTangle, “has been a valuable tool in helping researchers sift through large amounts of information in the environment and identify malicious 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, running until January. That letter was also signed by a dozen groups and individual academic researchers.
“For years, CrowdTangle has represented the industry’s best practice for real-time platform transparency. It has become a cornerstone of understanding how misinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining public discourse and democracy,” Mozilla’s letter said.
Meta released another CrowdTangle, called Meta Content Library. But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, excluding many 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 collecting feedback about the Meta Content Library from “thousands of researchers to make it easier to use and help them find the data they need for their work.”
Meta said Wednesday that CrowdTangle doesn’t provide a complete picture of what’s happening on its platforms and said its new tools are perfect.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.
-Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology writer
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