What's happening? Facebook's parent company Meta has removed all development support from its social research tool CrowdTangle and is planning to shut the tool down, Bloomberg reported on June 23 citing anonymous sources. A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that CrowdTangle was recently appointed to a new team, who has been working to make some changes in the tool. “We are going to put the tool away for a while as the company is working on some staffing constraints,” he said and added that new users can still be added to accounts which already exist on the tracking tool. Why does this matter? Meta is always saying that its taking steps towards more transparency but removing a tool like CrowdTangle is a step backwards. Retiring CrowdTangle would kill the access that researchers and journalists have to its in-depth social media engagement…
