Bad news: Meta discontinues its anti-fake news software

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CrowdTangle is considered essential for spotting and analyzing misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. Yet Meta has announced that it will be dismantled on August 14, less than three months before the US elections.

While the Palo Alto-based company has indicated that it plans to replace it with a new tool, researchers remain critical, claiming that it doesn't have the same functionality. For years, CrowdTangle has enabled users to track the spread of conspiracy theories, incitement to violence and manipulation campaigns in real time. According to experts, the removal of the tool is part of the current trend among major digital platforms to reduce transparency. This trend is all the more worrying in the run-up to the US elections, which are ripe for the dissemination of false information that undermines the democratic process.

"A serious step backwards for transparency on social networks".

With elections due to take place in 2024 in a dozen countries, home to almost half the world's population, " removing access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent monitoring of the damage caused by misinformation ", according to Melanie Smith, Research Director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. She adds, "This is a serious step backwards for transparency on social networks." Even former CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman criticized the new version of the software still under development: "It's a whole new technology that Meta hasn't yet developed to protect the integrity of elections."

Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016. The group readily admits that during the 2019 elections in Louisiana, for example, the tool enabled campaign managers to identify false information, such as inaccurate voting times. During the 2020 presidential election, Facebook had also offered its tool to US election officials in each state to help them "quickly identify misinformation, interference and voter suppression".

Meta to restrict access to its fake news tracking tool

In an open letter, the Mozilla Foundation, a global non-profit organization, asked Meta to retain the service until at least January 2025. "Abandoning CrowdTangle while the new tool's content library lacks much of CrowdTangle's core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency" and poses a "direct threat" to the integrity of elections, states the letter signed by dozens of observers and researchers. Andy Stone, spokesman for Meta, refutes these accusations. Declaring that the letter's assertions are "simply not true", he assures that the content library will contain "more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle" and will be made available to academics and non-profit electoral organizations.

Another concern is that Meta will not make this new tool available to for-profit media. A regrettable decision, since in the past, some journalists have used CrowdTangle to investigate public health crises, human rights violations and natural disasters. Why this decision? CrowdTangle helped to "hold Meta accountable for enforcing its own rules", explains Tim Harper, policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Indeed, journalists have also used CrowdTangle to report unflattering information about the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Notably its difficulties in moderating content on its platforms and the abundance of pirated games present on its video game app.

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