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The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups are pushing back on Meta\u2019s decisions to shut down its research tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. In an <\/a>, the group calls on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after 2024 elections, saying that it will harm their ability to track election misinformation in a year where \u201capproximately half the world\u2019s population\u201d are slated to vote.<\/p>\n The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups as well as the former CEO of CrowdTangle, comes one week after Meta confirmed it would <\/a> the tool in August 2024. \u201cMeta\u2019s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what\u2019s happening on Facebook and Instagram \u2014 during the biggest election year on record,\u201d the letter writers say.<\/p>\n \u201cThis means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It\u2019s a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.\u201d The group asks Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025, and to \u201crapidly onboard\u201d election researchers onto its latest tools.<\/p>\n CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. It allows researchers, journalists and other groups to track how content is spreading across Facebook and Instagram. It\u2019s also often cited by journalists in unflattering stories about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied <\/a> in an investigation into why Facebook Gaming was overrun with spam and pirated content in 2022. CrowdTangle was also the source for \u201c<\/a>,\u201d a (now defunct) Twitter bot that posted daily updates on the most-interacted withFacebook posts containing links. The project, created by a New York Times<\/em> reporter, regularly showed far-right and conservative pages over-performing, leading Facebook executives to argue the data wasn’t an accurate representation of what was <\/a> on the platform.<\/p>\n With CrowdTangle set to shut down, Meta is instead highlighting a new program called the <\/a>, which provides researchers with new tools to access publicly-accessible data in a streamlined way. The company has said it\u2019s more powerful than what CrowdTangle enabled, but it\u2019s also much more strictly controlled. Researchers from nonprofits and academic institutions must apply, and be approved, in order to access it. And since the vast majority of newsrooms are for-profit entities, most journalists will be automatically ineligible for access (it\u2019s not clear if Meta would allow reporters at nonprofit newsrooms to use the Content Library.)<\/p>\n The other issue, according to Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle\u2019s former CEO who left Meta in 2021 is that the Meta Content Library isn\u2019t currently powerful enough to be a full CrowdTangle replacement. \u201cThere are some areas where the MCL has way more data than CrowdTangle ever had, including reach and comments in particular,\u201d Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle\u2019s former CEO who left Meta in 2021 wrote in a post <\/a> last week. \u201cBut there are also some huge gaps in the tool, both for academics and civil society, and simply arguing that it has more data isn\u2019t a claim that regulators or the press should take seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n