CrowdTangle, a platform owned by Meta used to study the flow of content on Facebook and Instagram, is closing its doors. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company has decided to end the service, which was used to analyze the spread of misinformation on social networks, after a series of significant failures.
The service will be replaced by a tool called “Meta Content Library”, but only academics and non-profit researchers will be able to use it. With this change, for-profit news organizations will not be able to request access to this tool, which is simpler than CrowdTangle.
Meta claims that its Content Library (the company’s response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act) has new features, such as information about public comments and content search based on visits. However, the first testers have discovered that it lacks geographical activity data or the ability to download data from public posts.
The decision by Meta to end CrowdTangle and replace it with a service with fewer features could be interpreted as a way to limit the ability to analyze the activity on its platforms, including the functioning of its algorithms or the spread of fake news, aspects for which Instagram and Facebook have been criticized (and denounced) in the past.
This Thursday, former co-founder and CEO of CrowdTangle, Brandon Silverman, criticized Meta’s decision to shut down the service. Silverman said in a blog post that ending CrowdTangle 12 weeks before the United States presidential elections was “incredibly irresponsible”.
However, he added that he was optimistic that the legacy of CrowdTangle would help “inspire a permanent set of regulations that make real-time access to public data a legal requirement and a permanent part of how we responsibly and collaboratively manage the Internet.”
