Meta’s CrowdTangle will be deprecated in August, according to the company.
Last week, Meta announced that CrowdTangle, a tool commonly used by researchers and journalists to uncover what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram, will be phased out in August of this year. In 2024, elections will be held in 64 countries, almost half the world, and social media platforms’ important transparency tools will become increasingly inaccessible. The outcome of this election year is dire, against the backdrop of a severe global humanitarian crisis, the violence of war, and widespread threats to civil liberties around the world. Digital infrastructure is a core piece of the puzzle. Digital infrastructure is a source of information, storytelling, organizing, and newsworthy commentary, but it is also a source of hate speech and misinformation/disinformation, including election lies that can contribute to offline violence and conflict. It also allows for spread. .
For years, watchdog groups, election monitors, activists, researchers, and journalists have used CrowdTangle and other social media transparency tools to track online hate speech, report violence against minority groups, and report violence against minority groups. has studied the spread of extremist content online among organizations. Other important public interest topics. Initiatives such as the Meta 2020 U.S. Election Research Project, a series of papers produced through industry-academia collaboration in which academic researchers collaborate with researchers within Meta, have produced fascinating research, but independent It is equally important to support research and hold platforms accountable. An independent investigation is extremely important, especially since a project like the Meta 2020 project is unlikely to be repeated either within Meta or on other platforms, and other internal investigations conducted by the platform may never be made public. is. The fall of CrowdTangle is a devastating loss to the transparency efforts that enable important independent technology research. This is another blow to data access for researchers since Twitter (now X) and Reddit ended free data access last year.
Despite the loss of transparency tools for these platforms, Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) opens up a promising path to accessing platform data. Under Article 40 of the DSA, large-scale online platforms (VLOPs) provide real-time public access to researchers studying various “systemic risks” to the European Union, including risks to public health, security and public debate. It is mandatory to provide access to data. , freedom of expression, election integrity, and more. Importantly, the law does not specify that researchers need to be based in the EU to be eligible for data access, but it does allow platforms to assess the relevance of their research questions within the law. It also provides no guidance as to how it should be interpreted. It also does not specify exactly how the platform provides access to this data. All these unknowns open the door to different interpretations of who and what obligations data platforms have and how that data is made available.
The promise that researchers will have reliable access to public data under the DSA depends on its implementation. In this year of global elections, the independent research community must promote broad access to publicly available data for public interest purposes, process researchers’ applications in a timely manner, and ultimately grant access to their data. We rely on good faith efforts by the platforms that design our programs. Researchers have already noted that some transparency programs, such as TikTok’s Researcher API, miss the mark. Many other public data access programs are only available to researchers at academic institutions, excluding journalists and civil society advocates who do the important work of holding platforms accountable. CrowdTangle’s supposed successor Meta’s content library is also difficult to access for non-academic researchers.
The DSA does not mandate how platforms must provide this data, so for now it only requires that they do so, and tools such as content libraries are actively serving the research community. The jury is still out on whether it is. That’s why we started a data access audit.
Last week, we launched a project in collaboration with the Coalition for Independent Tech Research and the George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics to audit researchers’ access to data under the DSA. We want policymakers, platforms, and the public to be objectively informed about how well these new tools are enabling research, journalism, and other public interest work, and where they may not be. We aim to provide a comprehensive evaluation. You can participate in a data access audit by completing this survey.
We will take a close look at our content libraries and other transparency programs to determine where we are falling short and who is being left behind. If we are successful, with the help of the global research community, we will evidence clearer guidance from policymakers on what platforms must do to comply with the data access provisions of the law. You will be able to make your claims together. The new information provided in this study will also help us negotiate directly with platforms to design features and improvements to their data access products.
Despite DSA’s promise of greater transparency and greater access to data, CrowdTangle and other platform APIs may disappear before our eyes, with no viable alternatives in place. We are witnessing that there is. In a most critical year, eliminating hundreds of researchers, journalists, and public advocates who rely on platform transparency tools every day to understand and report on our media and social environment is dangerous. And it has the opposite effect. If this happens, you will lose. The only way to know whether a platform is keeping us out or inviting us in is to organize. We hope you will join us.
