Meta’s Discontinuation of CrowdTangle: A Blow to Disinformation Monitoring
In 2017, a rare consensus emerged among lawmakers and social media companies: the unpreparedness for foreign interference in elections through social media. Eight years later, that shared concern appears to have dissolved as Meta, Facebook’s parent company, prepares to discontinue CrowdTangle, a crucial tool for tracking disinformation and misinformation trends. This move, alongside similar decisions by other social media platforms, has sparked alarm among experts who fear a significant setback in the fight against online manipulation, particularly as the 2024 US presidential election looms.
Meta’s replacement for CrowdTangle, the "Meta Content Library," offers diminished capabilities and restricts access for media organizations. This, experts argue, creates a more permissive environment for foreign actors like China and Russia to exploit social media for political division. Nathan Doctor of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring to counter foreign influence campaigns, highlighting how restricted data access hinders early identification and response to these threats.
The trend of reduced transparency extends beyond Meta. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) saw the disbanding of its foreign disinformation monitoring team. Snapchat and Discord have also downsized their trust and safety teams, limiting their capacity to address harmful content. While these platforms are smaller than Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, the collective impact of these decisions represents a significant erosion of safeguards against online manipulation.
The scale of Meta’s platforms, boasting billions of users, amplifies the impact of CrowdTangle’s demise. Journalists and researchers, already facing challenges in navigating the complex landscape of online disinformation, now lose a vital resource for understanding its spread. Davey Alba of Bloomberg underscores the tool’s crucial role, particularly during election cycles, and expresses concern about its removal ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, a known target for foreign interference.
The lack of response from Meta to bipartisan concerns raised by US lawmakers points to a broader issue of accountability. Brandi Geurkink of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research criticizes Meta’s apparent disregard for public, policymaker, and media opposition to the decision, particularly during a critical election year. This perceived lack of transparency and responsiveness contrasts sharply with the mea culpas offered by tech companies in 2016 following revelations of Russian interference.
The current landscape marks a stark departure from the post-2016 environment where social media companies, under scrutiny, pledged to address foreign interference. Meta’s CrowdTangle decision, and the broader trend of reduced data access, undermines these promises. Geurkink criticizes Meta’s conflicting messaging, noting that the company actively promoted CrowdTangle for election monitoring in previous cycles. Experts predict a surge in undetected disinformation campaigns, making the current situation potentially worse than in 2016, when tools like the Twitter and Reddit APIs offered greater access to data. The increasing opacity of social media platforms, coupled with inconsistent regulatory approaches across countries, creates a fragmented transparency ecosystem, making it increasingly challenging to discern truth from falsehood online.