CrowdTangle
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CrowdTangle is a social media analytics tool that was started in 2011 by Brandon Silverman and Matt Garmur and was acquired by Facebook in 2016.[1]. CrowdTangle was called “perhaps the most effective transparency tool in the history of social media”[2] by the New York Times and is regularly cited by journalists, academics, researchers and lawmakers around the world. Going into 2020, CrowdTangle was increasingly a source of tension among executives inside Meta and the team was disbanded in October of 2021[3]; however, the product itself is still active and used by tens of thousands of users around the world.
History
CrowdTangle began as a tool designed to help publishers better understand social media. Fast Company called it the “secret tool that BuzzFeed, Upworthy and everyone else is using to win Facebook.”[4] In 2016, they were acquired by Facebook and over the next four years, they increasingly focused on transparency by opening up the platform to academics, researchers, human rights activists, election protection groups and more.
Use Cases
From the BBC to CNN to NPR to hundreds of local news outlets, thousands of news organizations use CrowdTangle on a daily basis to study social media. As a part of their work with news partners, CrowdTangle launched partnerships with local news organizations, including the Local Media Consortium, and fact-checking organizations like the International Fact Checking Network.
In addition to publishers, CrowdTangle was one of the main tools used by academics and researchers to study Facebook and Instagram starting in 2017. Hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published citing CrowdTangle, including in publications like Nature, Science and others. It was widely used during the first few years of COVID to study misinformation related to the pandemic[5]. It's also one of the only archives of social media content related to state-sponsored influence campaigns[6].
Break-up
In 2020, the team was largely disbanded following internal disagreements about the future of the work. Brandon Silverman left in October of 2021 but has continued to push for transparency through regulation[7], including legislation like the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act[8] and the Digital Services Act in Europe. Despite concerns that CrowdTangle is going to be shut down[9], it continues to remain active and was cited by Meta as one of the main ways it is helping support fact-checkers and researchers in one of its most recent transparency reports[10]
References[edit]
- ↑ Newton, Casey. "Facebook buys CrowdTangle, the tool publishers use to win the internet". The Verge.
- ↑ Smith, Ben. "A Former Facebook Executive Pushes to Open Social Media's 'Black Boxes'". The New York Times.
- ↑ Roose, Kevin. "Facebook's Data Wars". The New York Times.
- ↑ Kessler, Sarah. "The Secret Tool That Upworthy, BuzzFeed, and Everyone Else Is Using To Win Facebook". Fast Company.
- ↑ Ghaffary, Shirin. "Why no one really knows how bad Facebook's vaccine misinformation problem is". Vox.
- ↑ Hutchinson, Andrew. "Meta Launches New Initiative to Share Data on Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior with More Researchers". Social Media Today.
- ↑ Smith, Ben. "A Former Facebook Executive Pushes to Open Social Media's 'Black Boxes'". The New York Times.
- ↑ Newton, Casey. "Meta, TikTok, and YouTube may finally have to start sharing data with researchers". The Verge.
- ↑ Smalley, Seth. "Meta won't comment on its plans to abandon CrowdTangle". Poynter.
- ↑ "Signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation deliver their first baseline reports in the Transparency Centre". European Commission.
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