With the CrowdTangle shutdown looming, many publishers and researchers are in a panic. If you use CrowdTangle, you know how powerful the tool can be. Let’s talk briefly about what it does.
CrowdTangle was a public insights tool that displays all public content and helps users analyze the insights. These insights can help users discover content and gauge performance, as well as study trends across social media. In short, it is a high-powered content discovery and insights tool designed to help publishers track influential accounts across social media.
The ability to track content across social media is critical for many publishers, researchers, and more.
Meta is shutting down the service
Back in March, Meta announced that it would discontinue the service as of August 14th, 2024. For those keeping track, that’s next week.
The tool has been in “maintenance mode” for a while, only allowing users to access current data but not add new users. As of August 14th, the tool will be discontinued entirely, the API will no longer be available, and the interface and Chrome extension will no longer work.
From Meta:
Our data-sharing products are evolving alongside technology and regulatory changes. Phasing out CrowdTangle will allow us to focus resources on our new research tools, Meta Content Library & Content Library API, which provide useful, high-quality data to researchers. Meta Content Library was designed to help us meet new regulatory requirements for data-sharing and transparency while meeting Meta’s rigorous privacy and security standards.
Why the CrowdTangle shutdown matters so much
Simply put, it matters because there isn’t a comparable tool. This tool has an unmatched amount of data available to researchers and media, prompting CAP to send a letter to Meta on behalf of 51 other organizations and researchers. Even a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators sent a letter to Meta on July 24th to highlight the lack of a suitable replacement for transparency.
At the same time, we are deeply concerned that Meta Content Library also has significant limitations that make it an inadequate replacement for CrowdTangle at the current time. Most notable is that, while CrowdTangle retains historical time-series data about posts that allows for reproducible searches and seeing trends over time, Meta Content Library currently only provides a view of the platform as it exists at the moment that a search is run. This makes it difficult if not impossible for a researcher to reproduce a search conducted by another and also significantly limits and complicates the ability of researchers to study what occurred on the platform retroactively prior to, and after, the development of the research question. More generally, researchers have raised concern that Meta Content Library has more restrictive data retention policies and export rules, more limited interfaces, fewer tools for researcher collaboration, fewer insight capacities, and less accessibility to those without data science backgrounds. One analysis cited 11 different dimensions in which Meta Content Library has fewer features than CrowdTangle for research.
The timing is also frustrating, as many use this to scrutinize information during election cycles. In a tough political climate, misinformation is rampant. We’re losing a critical tool for social media analysis at a very contentious time.
From Melissa Angle at ABCJ:
CrowdTangle was a free, easy way for newsrooms to quickly see who’s sharing content and where. Its tools and plugins brought transparency to social media — what competitors are doing, what different media are posting, what’s resonating with audiences on which platforms. We’ve not found a free replacement that comes close.
What’s next?
The landscape is shifting, and while the loss of CrowdTangle is significant, it opens the door for innovation. We can’t reveal too much just yet, but we’re always working to improve the insights you get within True Anthem. Stay tuned—exciting developments are on the horizon.
