For more than a decade, researchers and journalists have relied on a digital tool called CrowdTangle to track and fight the spread of viral falsehoods online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But earlier this week, the owner of CrowdTangle, Meta, shut the tool down<\/a>. The tech giant has replaced it with its new Content Library, which it says will serve the same purpose and be \u201cmore user friendly<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As long-time users of CrowdTangle to track and analyse online misinformation campaigns, we are sceptical of this claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are also very concerned by the fact CrowdTangle\u2019s closure comes at a time when misinformation on social media is rife \u2014 and is bound to worsen in the lead up to the November presidential election in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, why did Meta decide to close CrowdTangle now? And how will this affect the fight against the spread of misinformation and disinformation online?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Founded in 2011, CrowdTangle quickly gained popularity among media outlets which used it to track and analyse trending topics and articles on social media platforms for commercial purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook (as Meta was then called) purchased the company five years later<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were several reasons why CrowdTangle was a powerful tool for researchers like us who study the spread of misinformation and disinformation online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstly, we could download large datasets to use for computational modelling and other forms of analysis. The data was also easily searchable using keywords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could also use CrowdTangle to automatically analyse trends in large collections of data from multiple sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These features helped us analyse the influence of far-right accounts<\/a> on Facebook during the COVID pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They also helped us analyse the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Meta\u2019s content moderation policies in curbing the spread of vaccine misinformation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But CrowdTangle was not a vital tool only for researchers like us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Journalists at the New York Times used it to expose the influence of far-right accounts in the US<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their peers at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation also used it to monitor QAnon\u2019s growing influence during the pandemic<\/a>, and to track disinformation fuelling the recent race riots<\/a> in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n