The Death of CrowdTangle

Meta is killing a tool you’ve never heard of – why should you care?

August 14, 2024
By Leticia Bode

Today, Meta quietly pulled the plug on CrowdTangle, a tool they had acquired back in 2016. CrowdTangle is a tool that helps parse the data that people share on Meta’s social platforms, Facebook and Instagram.

A data tool? I can’t think of anything less exciting than that.

Except that monitoring data from CrowdTangle has brought key local news stories to the Black community in Atlanta, Georgia,  helped BBC, Agence France-Presse, and  Buzzfeed track misinformation in the U.S. and Europe, and even helped a historic tuba find its way home in New Orleans.

CrowdTangle made all of that work possible.

In a world in which more people are increasingly online, that is where they gain and share information. The nature of that information is therefore crucially important to knowing everything from what people think about an election – particularly in a year in which more people are voting than ever before – to what people believe to be true, to whether people are planning to overthrow a government. ß revise to reflect info from testimonials

CrowdTangle has thousands of users around the globe, who use it to create impactful journalism, study the modern media environment, or map the nature of information flows around the world. The loss of access to this tool will have significant impacts on the amount and type of research that can be done. 

In an era in which calls for transparency are frequent, it is shocking that we are going backwards in terms of public data access. Indeed, 56,000 people have signed a petition in protest of the sunsetting of CrowdTangle, and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders have put forward a letter asking for more information and a delay in the elimination of the tool.

KGI agrees that more, not less, public data should be available to researchers, journalists, and civil society.

To commemorate the life and untimely death of CrowdTangle, please join us and our partners, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, for our memorial to CrowdTangle, September 30 from 1:30 to 3:30pm ET online and in person at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Click here to register.

Learn more about the life and death of CrowdTangle at the CrowdTangle Memorial.