JAKARTA - One thing researchers use to track the spread of viral stories on Facebook, including those that spread misinformation, is a tool that Meta has called CrowdTangle.
Based on anonymous sources, Bloomberg reports what many suspect, that Facebook has removed most development support from CrowdTangle and is making plans to shut down the tool.
Removing CrowdTangle would withdraw access that the likes of Kevin Roose have used to surface data showing high engagement with far-right news sources on Facebook. This includes listing results that sometimes appear to contradict Facebook's official curated reports.
The top-performing link posts by US Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:1. NBC News2. Breitbart3. NPR4. People Royals5. Fox News6. allkpop7. MAURY8. KOLO 8 News Now9. Still Moments10. TMZ
— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) June 23, 2022
In an article last July for The New York Times, Roose described an internal "data war" over how much information companies should release. While CrowdTangle founder and CEO, Brandon Silverman, argues that they should share more data. Silverman finally left the company in October 2021.
CrowdTangle is a public insight tool from Facebook that helps publishers, journalists, researchers, fact-checkers and others follow, analyze, and report on what's happening on social media.
They do this by making public content from popular Pages, Groups, Instagram accounts, and subreddits easier to find, and the engagement data on that content, (i.e., shares, views, comments, and reactions) easy to sort at scale. CrowdTangle does not track content from regular Facebook profiles.
In a Twitter thread, the head of Facebook's News Feed, John Hegeman, argued that Roose's daily Top 10 list, compiled based on CrowdTangle data, shows engagement data that is accurate but "does not represent what most people see on FB."
As The Verge reports, Hegeman claims a better way to prove it is through data showing which posts are being reached the most. But Facebook doesn't usually share that data directly.
When Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016, it said the tool could help publishers “reveal the stories that matter, measure their social performance, and identify influencers.”
It tracks story performance on other networks, including Instagram and Twitter. The Bloomberg report cites how voter advocacy group Common Cause has used it to find misinformation in real time that has been flagged to Twitter and Facebook, for deletion.
Today's report says Meta started the official process of shutting down the tool in February but stopped it due to a push by the EU Digital Services Act.
Now finally CrowdTangle is on track to shut down after Facebook engineers have been tasked with doing just that. A Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg that CrowdTangle will remain active through at least this year's midterm elections and claims Meta has plans to provide researchers with "more valuable" tools.
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