(Headline USA) Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by leftists to monitor social media posts and promote censorship on the company’s social-media sites.
Wednesday’s shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by several activist organizations hoping the Mark Zuckerberg-run company would intervene, as it did in the 2020 election, to prevent information critical of Democrats from gaining traction on the platforms.
“For years, CrowdTangle has represented an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency,” the Mozilla Foundation wrote in a March letter that was also signed by several dozen groups and individual academics.
“It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy,” the censorship activists wrote.
Zuckerberg acknowledged having colluded with intelligence agencies like the FBI to kill stories related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, skepticism of coronavirus vaccines and evidence of widespread vote fraud in the 2020 race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, among other topics. Much of the censored content was ultimately validated and acknowledged as true after the fact.
Already, during the 2024 race, Meta’s platforms have come under fire for stealthily censoring information regarding the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, prompting Zuckerberg to call the GOP presidential nominee and apologize.
Yet, despite keeping a lower profile than in the 2020 race—in which he gave nearly half a billion dollars to support mail-in balloting and other efforts, specifically targeting the urban areas of otherwise red or swing states—Zuckerberg may still seek to interfere with the upcoming race as leftists grow more desperate to drag Democrat candidate Kamala Harris across the finish line.
Last year, the company hired former CIA agent Aaron Berman in the top spot overseeing its “election policies.”
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016, but on Wednesday it said the internet spying tool didn’t provide a complete picture of what was happening on its platforms and that new tools were more comprehensive.
Meta has released an alternative to CrowdTangle, called the Meta Content Library, and has been gathering feedback from “hundreds of researchers in order to make it more user-friendly and help them find the data they need for their work,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post last week.
But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics have also complained that it’s not as useful as CrowdTangle—at least not yet.
In May, dozens 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 that it keep the spying tool running through at least January so it would be available through the U.S. presidential election.
“This decision jeopardizes essential pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta’s transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile,” the letter complained.
CrowdTangle, “has been an essential tool in helping researchers parse through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify harmful content and threats,” it added.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
