Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organizations and journalists to monitor social media posts, notably to track how misinformation spreads on the company's platforms.
Wednesday's shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by researchers and nonprofits. In May, dozens of groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Human Rights Watch and NYU鈥檚 Center for Social Media & Politics, sent a letter to the company asking that it keep the tool running through at least January so it would be available through the U.S. presidential elections.
鈥淭his decision jeopardizes essential pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta鈥檚 transparency efforts during this critical period, and at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly fragile,鈥 the said.
CrowdTangle, 鈥渉as been an essential tool in helping researchers parse through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify harmful content and threats,鈥 it added.
In March, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation sent Meta a similar letter asking it to keep the tool, which was available for free, functioning until January. That letter was also signed by several dozen groups and individual academic researchers.
鈥淔or years, CrowdTangle has represented an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy," the said.
Meta has released an alternative to CrowdTangle, called the Meta Content Library. But access to it is limited to academic researchers and nonprofits, which excludes most news organizations. Critics have also complained that it's not as useful as CrowdTangle 鈥 at least not yet.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said in a last week that the company has been gathering feedback about Meta Content Library from 鈥渉undreds of researchers in order to make it more user-friendly and help them find the data they need for their work.鈥
Meta said Wednesday that CrowdTangle doesn鈥檛 provide a complete picture of what is happening on its platforms and said its new tools are more comprehensive.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.
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U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris on Saturday accepted an invitation from CNN to debate former U.S. president Donald Trump on Oct. 23.
The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has risen to 31, including seven women and three children, Lebanon's health minister said on Saturday.
Voting has ended Saturday in Sri Lanka's presidential election as the country seeks to recover from the worst economic crisis in its history and the resulting political upheaval.
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The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said Friday that it plans to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement that calls for tech giant Microsoft to buy the power to supply its data centers with carbon-free energy.
Lebanese authorities on Thursday banned walkie-talkies and pagers from being taken on flights from Beirut airport, the National News Agency reported, after thousands of such devices exploded during a deadly attack on Hezbollah this week.
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Jim Lester鈥檚 farm hopped on the cow-cuddling trend in early August, and his time slots have been pretty well sold out ever since.
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