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 data and analytics. In 2020, journalists at The Verve used this tool to bring up data showing high engagement with right-wing news sources on Facebook and listing results that sometimes appear to be at odds with Facebook’s curated official reports. Throughout 2020 and 2021, there had been an "internal data wars" going on in Meta as to how much data CrowdTangle should release to the public. CrowdTangle founder Brandon Silverman argued that it should share more data and be more transparent, before leaving the company in October 2021. What is CrowdTangle? "CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Facebook that helps publishers, journalists, researchers, fact-checkers and more follow, analyse, and…
