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The Mozilla Foundation and numerous other research and advocacy organizations are reversing Meta’s decision to shut down its research tool CrowdTangle later this year.in the group asked Meta to keep Cloudtangle online until after the 2024 election, saying it would compromise its ability to track election misinformation in a year when “nearly half of the world’s population” is expected to vote. ing.
The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 organizations and CrowdTangle’s former CEO, comes a week after Meta confirmed it would use the tool in August 2024. “From looking at what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram in the biggest election year on record,” the letter authors say.
“This means that nearly all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitement to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It is a direct threat to our ability to protect our people.” The group is asking Meta to keep Crowdtangle online until January 2025 and to “rapidly onboard” election researchers to the latest tools. .
CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. This allows researchers, journalists, and other groups to track how content is spreading on Facebook and Instagram. It is also often quoted by journalists in boring articles about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied on research into why Facebook Gaming was flooded with spam and pirated content in 2022. CrowdTangle was also a source of information for “.” was a (now defunct) Twitter bot that posted daily updates about Facebook posts, including the links with the most interactions.Project created by new york times The reporter said it regularly showed far-right and conservative pages were overperforming, and Facebook executives argued that the data did not accurately represent content on the platform.
With CrowdTangle set to shut down, Meta is highlighting a new program in its place called . This program provides researchers with new tools to access publicly accessible data in a streamlined manner. The company says it is more powerful than what CrowdTangle enabled, but more tightly controlled. Researchers at nonprofit organizations and academic institutions must apply and be approved for access. And since the majority of newsrooms are for-profit organizations, most journalists would automatically be disqualified from access (it’s unclear whether Meta will allow reporters from nonprofit newsrooms to use the content library) .
Another problem, according to former CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman, who left Meta in 2021, is that the Meta Content Library is not currently strong enough to be a full CrowdTangle replacement. Brandon Silverman, former CEO of CrowdTangle, who left Meta in 2021, said, “There are areas where MCL historically has much more data than CrowdTangle, especially reach and comments. There are a few,” he wrote in the post. last week. “However, there are also significant gaps in this tool for both academia and civil society, and claiming that we simply have more data is not a claim that should be taken seriously by regulators or the press.”
in a statement , Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that “academic institutions and nonprofit institutions pursuing scientific or public interest research may apply for access” to the Meta content library, which includes nonprofit election experts. . “The Meta Content Library is designed to contain more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle.”