Meta shuts monitoring tool in election year

Adigital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, Crowdtangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.

The tech giant says Crowdtangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organisations will largely not have access to.

For years, Crowdtangle has been a gamechanger, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year — a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.

“In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to Crowdtangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms,” Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said.

“It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency.”

Meta is set to replace Crowdtangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.

It’s a tool that some in the tech industry, including former Crowdtangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of Ai-enabled falsehoods.

“It’s an entire new muscle” that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman said, calling for “openness and transparency.”

In recent election cycles, researchers say Crowdtangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence. By its own admission, Meta — which bought Crowdtangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.