WASHINGTON – A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected fire hose of political misinformation.

The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after Aug 14, less than three months before the United States election.

The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organisations will largely not have access to.

For years, CrowdTangle has been a game changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech-industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections in 2024 – a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.

In a year where elections are taking place in dozens of countries that are home to almost half the global population, “cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms,” said Ms Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency.”

Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.

It is a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of artificial intelligence-enabled falsehoods.

“It’s an entire new muscle” that Meta has yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Mr Silverman told AFP, calling for “openness and transparency”.

In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.

By its own admission, Meta – which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 – said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.

In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them “quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression”.

The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.

Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global non-profit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.

“Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle’s core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency,” said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.

The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility, and decommissioning it would be a “direct threat” to the integrity of elections, it added.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter’s claims are “just wrong”, insisting that Content Library will contain “more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle” and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.

‘Lot of concerns’

Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.

Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises, human rights abuses and natural disasters.

Meta’s decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.

CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped “hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies”, said Mr Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Centre for Democracy and Technology.

Organisations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme, including AFP, will have access to Content Library.

But other researchers and non-profits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives.

Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.

“While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it’s not super clear if many independent researchers – already worried about losing CrowdTangle’s functionality – will,” Mr Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of Spanish non-profit Maldita, told AFP.

“It has generated a lot of concerns.” AFP