Independent Researchers and Journalists Mourn the Loss of CrowdTangle

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

In this episode, we're crashing a funeral... for CrowdTangle, a piece of software that allowed journalists and independent researchers to get insights into social media. Not our usual material, but this particular loss marks a huge blow in the ongoing fight for public access to data from the platforms, and underscores why we need to continue to fight for transparency. And the folks convened by the Knight-Georgetown Institute and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research refused to let it go unmarked.

Related Reading

• How to Defend Independent Technology Research from Corporate and Political Opposition
• Researchers Consider the Impact of Meta's CrowdTangle Shutdown
• What Does CrowdTangle's Demise Signal for Data Access Under the DSA?
• The Urgency of Social Media Data Access for Electoral Integrity

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode, brought to us by audio reporter Rebecca Rand.

Rebecca Rand:

Three weeks ago on a Monday afternoon in a conference room at Georgetown University, about three dozen mourners gathered to pay their respects and say goodbye. Journalist Julia Angwin, dressed in all black, stood up front.

Julia Angwin:

Hello fellow mourners.

Rebecca Rand:

She was there to deliver a eulogy.

Julia Angwin:

We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and times of a piece of software called CrowdTangle.

Rebecca Rand:

60 more people were watching on via Zoom, and the crowd was a mix of academic researchers, folks from non-profits, legislators, regulators, journalists, technologists, and students. And yep, they were all there because a month and a half earlier, Meta had pulled the plug on CrowdTangle, a software company they'd bought several years ago.

Julia Angwin:

To state the obvious, it's not normal to hold funerals for software. But this software stood for something bigger than its executables. It stood for the power of the people against corporations that control and shape our speech. We grieve its loss and we seek to use its life as inspiration to build a brighter future.

Rebecca Rand:

So if you're feeling a little bit lost at this point, let me give you some background. CrowdTangle was a Facebook monitoring tool created in 2012 by Brandon Silverman. And he made it to help organizers and advocates see what people in their networks, organizations interested in the same topics as they were, were talking about on social media. But it didn't take long for people to figure out that it actually had this broader application beyond these sort of small networks. People could actually use CrowdTangle to monitor chatter on Facebook as a whole, specifically looking at which posts got the most likes and comments from users. This was information that individual people siloed in their own news feeds couldn't see. Julia Angwin, the woman who's speaking, she's the head of Proof, a nonprofit data journalism outlet, and she used CrowdTangle a lot. And I'm actually just going to play the rest of her eulogy now because she did a really excellent job of summing up what CrowdTangle was, why it was important, and how it died.

Julia Angwin:

CrowdTangle did something essential. It allowed us to see what was on the public's newsstand. For those of you too young to remember what a newsstand is, it was a place where you could buy a wide range of newspapers and magazines. The one near my apartment in New York was a standalone metal shed on a street corner, operated by an Indian immigrant. The shed is still there, but now they just sell sodas and candy. Back then though, visiting a newsstand was a way of dipping into the zeitgeist. In one glance, you could take in all the magazine covers and top newspaper headlines. You could also tell which publications had paid for better placement, they were the ones in front with more of their pages visible. Lesser publications were in the back or sometimes you even had to ask if they had one.

During big public events, whether it was a presidential election or the O. J. Simpson trial, scanning the headlines of the newsstand was a way to get a sense of the pulse of America. I remember when I lived in DC as a young reporter right out of college, during the Clinton Administration, when the Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years. All the newsstand headlines were about the House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his contract with America. But algorithmic news feeds changed all that. In 2006, Facebook introduced the first newsfeed and soon after that, all the other social platforms followed. The zeitgeist moved online and became personalized. My newsstand became the items in my feed and it looked entirely different from your newsstand, which was items in your feed. And that was entirely different from my mom's feed and your brother's feed and your uncle's feed. And in the beginning we felt like we had some control over these feeds by choosing who to friend or who to follow.

But slowly the tech company started taking over our feeds. They interrupted us with recommendations for groups to join and pages to follow, posts to like, advertisements to click on, and people to poke. Does anyone remember poking? This was an early Facebook feature that allowed you to poke someone's profile. I honestly cannot even tell you what it actually meant. But anyway, the craziest thing about this new algorithmic life we were all leading was that none of us had any idea what anyone else was seeing. Everyone was in their own filter bubble shaped by technology and the zeitgeist had splintered into million feeds and no one could see it all in a glance. Enter CrowdTangle. It arrived on the scene and gave us a glimpse into zeitgeist. CrowdTangle was created in 2012 by Brandon Silverman and Matt Garmur. They were originally trying to solve a different problem, how to help advocates organize better on Facebook. But soon realized the most useful part of their tool was the dashboard that let organizations see how their Facebook posts were performing.

Soon CrowdTangle became the best and only way to get a sense of what was happening on the biggest and most important social platform, Facebook. If you wanted to know what the top performing post on Facebook was, you checked CrowdTangle's Dashboard. After the 2016 presidential election, it became clear just how important that transparency was. CrowdTangle wasn't just a tool for dipping into the cultural zeitgeist. The election showed us that Facebook had become the center of political movements around the world. It was where Trump's campaign excelled. It was where the Russians tried to influence our elections. It was where the Burmese government incited violence against the Rohingyas. It was the public square in every nation. And so perhaps it was inevitable that such a powerful tool would not survive on its own.

Just a few days after the 2016 election, Facebook bought CrowdTangle. At first, Facebook let it continue operating fairly independently, even when it was embarrassing. Journalists and researchers used CrowdTangle to reveal just how far propaganda and lies were spreading across Facebook. Facebook executives defended their platform by saying that CrowdTangle only provided a look at which posts were most engaging, but another metric, reach, would show that less outrageous posts weren't what most people were seeing. Side note, I tested that claim, it wasn't true. I built a tool to analyze reach and it still showed that Facebook was amplifying misleading and extreme content. But ultimately it seems that transparency was just too embarrassing for Facebook. As journalist Casey Newton wrote, "CrowdTangle became perhaps the weirdest product in Facebook's history. Beloved by its users and disavowed by its owners." And its demise was inevitable. In 2021, Facebook dissolved the internal CrowdTangle team. In 2022, it stopped accepting new users. And finally, in August of this year, Facebook pulled the plug on CrowdTangle. It had lived just 12 short years.

To comply with European transparency laws, Facebook came out with a replacement tool called the Meta Content Library, that it claims is better than CrowdTangle. That claim also turns out not to be true. Earlier this year, my newsroom Proof News worked with the Tau Center and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute to compare Meta's new tool with CrowdTangle. And on 11 key metrics, Meta's tool has fewer features than CrowdTangle. And most importantly, unlike CrowdTangle, it's not easily accessible, not by researchers and not at all accessible to pesky journalists. But Meta says it's awesome. The President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, says CrowdTangle was a flawed product that only measured "a narrow slice of a cake slice." Yes, that's a direct quote and I do not know how he slices cake. But Clegg also says that Meta's new tool is much, much more robust and much more sophisticated. In other words, Meta says, we should not grieve the loss of the public's only meaningful visibility into the public discourse on the most important newsstand in the world.

So as I was writing this, I thought, well, how do we mourn a loss when we're being told we haven't lost anything? Well, luckily somebody has tackled this question before, a man named Shakespeare. In his play, Julius Caesar, he has Mark Antony delivering the speech at the funeral of Julius Caesar, who has just been murdered by Roman senators. It's a tricky speech because the senators are convinced that they are better off without Caesar, but Mark Antony wants to subtly remind them of Caesar's virtues. And so with apologies to the bard, here's my CrowdTangle remix of the Mark Antony speech.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury CrowdTangle, not to praise it. The evil that men does lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with CrowdTangle. The noble Zuck hath told you CrowdTangle was not robust enough. If it were so, it was a grievous fault. And grievously hath CrowdTangle answered for it. Here, under leave of Meta and the rest, for Zuck is an honorable man. So they are all honorable men. Came I to speak at CrowdTangle's funeral. It was a faithful window into a closed platform, but Zuck says it was not robust enough and Zuck is an honorable man.

He hath brought many legless avatars to the internet and second homes for many executives. And yet CrowdTangle was not robust. When the propagandists have spread their lies, CrowdTangle hath revealed them. Robustness should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Zuck says it was not robust enough and Zuck is an honorable man. Speak not to disprove what Zuck spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. We all did love CrowdTangle once, not without cause. What cause withholds us then to mourn for it? My heart is in the coffin there with CrowdTangle and I must pause till it come back to me.

Rebecca Rand:

That was Julia Angwin with the eulogy. And after she spoke, the funeral MC invited other mourners in person and on Zoom to share their memories of their lost friend. Some of them really went whole hog on the funeral thing. This is researcher and tech maven, Halle Stern.

Halle Stern:

I'll always remember her willingness to be there for you. She was like a grandma, always had the best insights, always knew what was going on, and was up on the best gossip. She was even willing to tell you the things that you didn't want to hear. The scariest, the most hurtful. Some considered her blunt nature flawed, but that's just what comes with ambition.

Rebekah Tromble:

For the last two plus years, CrowdTangle was in pretty rapid decline. We knew that she wasn't doing well, she wasn't getting any care anymore. I think it is appropriate to mourn this particular moment six years on, I had hoped that I wouldn't be sitting here today essentially eulogizing software. But that's where we are and it's pretty remarkable.

Rebecca Rand:

So the next person you heard speaking was Dr. Rebekah Tromble who directs the Institute for Data Democracy and Politics at George Washington University. And she'll have more to say later. But clever personification aside, something I heard again and again at this funeral was how many researchers and watchdogs really relied on this tool, not just to monitor what was going on, but to actually advance human rights.

Jule Krüger:

Hello everyone. My name is Jule Krüger. I'm a Research Advisor for Quantitative Evidence and Analysis at Amnesty International. Amnesty International made two main uses of CrowdTangle. And a big role that CrowdTangle played for us was for our human rights investigations and research. It was a tool that helped us collect data on narrative trends and human rights discourse. And it also allowed us to collect evidence because we were using social media posts as evidence for our human rights investigations.

Rebecca Rand:

Building on that, Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley highlighted the importance of CrowdTangle as a tool to monitor political speech in the US.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley:

I used CrowdTangle to track political candidates and their efforts to persuade and sometimes deceive the public. I collected posts from Trump, from Clinton, Biden, and for a hot minute, Harris, as well as the candidates that ran for Senate and for governor over four election cycles. This work is helping us to understand how politicians communicate to their supporters and the public, how it's changed over time, especially with anti-normative candidates like Trump and his influence on down-ballot campaigns. And I used CrowdTangle to track the public's engagement with political posts, revealing how effective negative and uncivil messages are on the platform.

Rebecca Rand:

So something this funeral made clear to me is that this ongoing news story about the role social media is playing in polarizing our political climate here in the new United States. That story I've been hearing about for the better half of a decade now. A lot of that reporting exists thanks to CrowdTangle, especially this stuff about Facebook. You may ask, now that it's gone, are we in trouble? Here's what Rebekah Tromble says.

Rebekah Tromble:

We're now at a state of affairs that is frankly quite bleak. The fact that it is finally gone, I think, has really created this very clear stark moment for us to understand just how bad the situation was. And as we stride into five weeks from now, a really momentous election right here, it's all playing out very much here in DC. I'm worried, I'm concerned that we haven't been able to and we're not going to be able to keep on top of things like foreign malign interference to understand the ways that motivated actors are trying to manipulate discourse around these issues. And it frightens me.

Rebecca Rand:

So Rebekah Tromble is not the only person who has some serious concerns about what it means to lose this tool. Brandi Geurkink who directs the Coalition for Independent Tech Research, she added that, now that this tool has gone, the journalists she's been talking to, they're scrambling.

Brandi Geurkink:

Just last week, I was actually chatting to a leading reporter, I won't say who they are, who said just for the first time, she was working on a story and reached to go see, okay, well now I need to open up CrowdTangle and just thought, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to move forward. I don't know how I'm going to report on this critical issue. It reminded me of a text message that I got from another reporter right after Meta sent the email saying that they were going to shut down CrowdTangle on the 14th of August. That said, "I just don't know how we'll survive the election cycle without this data."

This is more than just being about data access. It's actually about the ability for civil society to participate and to have a voice and understanding what kind of information is spreading online and in flagging up potential dangers. And that has everything to do from health misinformation, to information that's spreading during natural disasters about evacuations, for instance, to election rumors. And civil society has to be part of that ecosystem to understand what's happening and to flag up potential dangers. And what Meta has done is essentially dramatically reduced that window by dramatically reducing the amount of people who can have a say and who can participate.

Rebecca Rand:

So this was an important point that many speakers made. Social media companies really want to limit who can see this data to people it thinks won't make a big stink about it. So definitely not pesky journalists like me. But even folks in academia have a hard time convincing social media companies to share information, even when they ask super nicely. That's how Rebekah Tromble got involved in this whole platform data access issue in the first place.

Rebekah Tromble:

I mentioned that I started all of this work six years ago, and at that time I was an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. And was entering into this new exciting phase of my career where I was going to partner with Twitter as part of the Healthy Conversations Initiative and they were going to give the research team that I was leading access to all this incredible data that no one else got to see. And also, I had just been asked to be part of the European Advisory Committee for Social Science One with Facebook. Oh my gosh, my life was changing. Six months later, I had nothing, none of the data that either of those companies had promised, and I got mad. It's incredibly frustrating.

They make all of these promises publicly, they get the press coverage, they whitewash and use our names to do it, and then they turn around and quietly give us nothing. And when we try to scream about it, they threaten to walk away or we just aren't even heard because who are we to the media? As someone who has learned the hard way, who has gone and tried every good faith route of partnering with these various platforms, just don't be tempted by it anymore. It will take so much of your time and energy for very little payoff. Very little payoff. And in fact, probably these initiatives unfortunately, have the potential to actually end careers particularly for junior scholars.

Rebecca Rand:

Brandi Geurkink encountered the same behavior when she was working at the Mozilla Foundation, trying to do research on the YouTube recommendation algorithm. She says she got together with the YouTube people to talk about data sharing.

Brandi Geurkink:

And I remember sitting in a room with the team, I was also involved in advocacy around more algorithmic transparency from YouTube. And them essentially sitting across from me saying, " You know we're not going to do anything until the DSA comes into force, right?" Because there was no incentive to do that.

Rebecca Rand:

The “DSA” Brandi's talking about is the Digital Services Act, which the EU adopted in 2022. And specifically this provision inside of it called Article 40 was a big step forward for transparency, at least for Europe. It compelled tech companies to give researchers access to data that would help with detecting, identifying, and understanding "Systemic risks," facing the EU. Now, what's considered a systemic risk? Well, there are several categories and none of them should surprise you all that much. The first one is dissemination of illegal content like child abuse imagery. Then there's negative effects for the exercise of fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy. The third one is negative effects on civic discourse, electoral processes, and public security. Which feels very relevant right now. And lastly, we have negative mental and physical effects related to gender-based violence, public health, and minors. Phew. These are all things that Article 40, which some actually call the CrowdTangle Provision, is trying to address.

And the incentive for companies to comply is pretty serious. If they don't, they could be slapped with a 6% fine on all global revenue. So if you're listening to this from the United States, weeks before a very scary presidential election, you're probably thinking to yourself, boy, we could use some of this over here. Why don't we have something like that? Well, we do or we're trying to. There's a bipartisan bill that's been introduced in Congress a few times now. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Much like the DSA, it's trying to require these companies to share data about what's going on on their platforms. It has bipartisan support, but as things go in the United States Congress, progress has stalled, and we're not sure when or if things will start moving again. In the end, the mourners were hopeful that CrowdTangle's death could lead to something bigger than just a broken link. To close it out, I'm going to turn it over to the emcee, Dave Karpf, and his closing speech.

David Karpf:

I was thinking while I was sitting in the audience about the ways that 2011 when CrowdTangle was born differ from today. And I want to suggest to you that 2011 was a more innocent time. Facebook had not gone public yet. It was still the Web 2.0 era. And CrowdTangle born in that moment signals to us, or at least signals to me, that we can have nice things. But we can only have nice things up until it becomes trouble for the platforms. That stays true until we make demands. And once those demands are enshrined in law, as we're seeing across the Atlantic, then those platforms are no longer giving us nice things out of largesse, but out of a duty to society. I think we as a community are also less innocent than we were in 2011.

The ambitions of 2011, and that was still back when we believed that we would crowd source everything. Tim O'Reilly, just a few years before that had written Government As a Platform, and that still seemed like an idea that was going to happen. At least to younger me. So I think in the years that have followed, we've also lost some of our innocence and come to recognize that power yields nothing without a demand. I believe that the best way that we can do justice to CrowdTangle, and it is a little weird holding a funeral for a piece of software, but the best way that we can recognize this was a nice thing that was lost because it became trouble for the platforms, is to say, we together are going to find these ways to make demands.

From our panel today, we have heard what I think are some fantastic ideas for how to move ourselves there. It will not be quick or easy. Because these are trillion dollar companies that we're asking to cause trouble for. But these are trillion dollar companies that now dominate our information environment, so we as citizens have to demand this transparency. They are simply too big to be left to offer nice things to us only when it is convenient for them. So thank you all for coming here and let's make this a moment that leads us forward to make collective demands together.

Rebecca Rand:

That was David Karpf, Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University, closing out a funeral for a piece of software. I'm Rebecca Rand with Tech Policy Press. Peace out.