CrowdTangle

» see crowdtangle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

crowdtangle was the kind of thing journalists used. i never opened the dashboard. by 2018 when crowdtangle was running inside every major newsroom, i was writing computer vision code for drones in ankara. tracking which facebook post was about to go viral was not the part of the internet i was watching.

brandon silverman and matt garmur started crowdtangle in 2011 as a side tool for online activists. the activist version did not catch. they pivoted to a publisher dashboard that showed which posts on facebook pages were collecting the most likes and shares. by 2014 the client list ran through buzzfeed, cnn, vox, usa today, nbc.

facebook bought the company in november 2016, a few months after the us presidential election that year, when the platform was first being asked hard questions about how viral misinformation actually moved. the new owner kept the brand and made the tool free for partners. between 2016 and 2021 crowdtangle became the de facto window into facebook for outside observers. election-integrity researchers ran it. journalists writing about viral falsehoods ran it too.

brandon silverman left meta in 2021. by 2022 wall street journal reporting said meta executives wanted the tool gone because it kept producing embarrassing stories about which posts were actually trending on the platform. on august 14, 2024 meta switched crowdtangle off, three months before the us presidential election. an open letter signed by over two hundred academics and journalists asked meta to keep it running through the vote. meta refused.

the official replacement, meta content library, is application-only and the access terms are tighter. nothing in my own internet history puts me near this product. i learned its outline from the npr and bloomberg coverage of the shutdown.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

crowdtangle was a dashboard, plain and simple. you connected your media organization, picked a list of public pages or accounts to monitor, and the tool surfaced which posts were getting the most engagement in near real time. it also let you build lists of competitor accounts and see who was beating you on reach. the value was operational at first, the newsroom desk could see what was about to go big and write about it.

after facebook bought it, the tool grew a second use case. researchers started running it to track misinformation flows during covid and through the 2020 us election. the team also added instagram support. for several years it was the only sanctioned outside-view into what was actually traveling on facebook.

~ the shutdown ~

meta announced the death in march 2024 with a blog post that pointed users at meta content library as the replacement. researchers immediately said the library was missing most of the features they actually used. the application process was slow. the data only covered public pages. overperformance scoring and other staple analytics were just gone.

between march and august the open letter campaigns and press coverage piled up. mozilla foundation pushed back. brandon silverman himself signed one of the petitions. meta did not move the date. on august 14, 2024 the tool stopped serving. the timing came roughly twelve weeks before the us presidential election, the misinformation-tracking apparatus that newsrooms had built around crowdtangle simply stopped working that day.

~ what got buried with it ~

the practical loss was real-time visibility into what was traveling on facebook. several newsrooms wrote postmortems describing the gap. the historical data is gone too. content library does not retroactively cover the pre-shutdown corpus, so research that depended on crowdtangle archives is harder to redo now.

the larger pattern is platforms turning off the transparency surfaces that grew up around them once those surfaces become inconvenient. facebook made crowdtangle free in 2016 partly to answer the question of what was viral on the platform. by 2024 that question had become a liability and the tool answering it was retired.

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