Source: in February, Meta started an official internal process to shut down CrowdTangle, but paused the plan as the EU's Digital Services Act gained traction
and fund it for a year or two — to ensure that this vital tool is here for the next series of elections. https://twitter.com/... Davey Alba / @daveyalba : NEW from me: CrowdTangle has been in limbo for months. Researchers say its uncertain future risks misinformation spreading in future elections. We have new details on just how much Facebook has siphoned off support for the tool over the past few months. https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/... Chris Bail / @chris_bail : Crowd tangle has plenty of problems, but before pulling support it sure would be nice to see Meta explain how they will replace it. https://www.bloomberg.com/... @ciaranoconnor : and for meta to say they'll maintain the service until after the Nov midterms also underscores just how little they care about anything happening outside the US, which isn't surprising but still shit. crowdtangle is essential for researchers worldwide, incl many human rights orgs https://twitter.com/... @sylviavarnham : I reported in January that Meta was pausing access to CrowdTangle. Many people I spoke with feared it would get cut completely. New reporting from @business shows that FB is planning to shut it down, “with some Facebook engineers tasked to killing it”: https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kim Wilson / @kimwilson : No new features have been added to CrowdTangle in over 16 months. https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @technology @ciaranoconnor : can't really emphasise enough how essential Crowdtangle is for conducting disinformation and extremism research on FB. Meta is slowly pulling life support so it's a matter of time before it's gone, which will be fairly disastrous https://twitter.com/... Ethan Zuckerman / @ethanz : Facebook/Meta appears to be letting Crowdtangle - a key tool for insights into the platform - decay. https://www.bloomberg.com/... It should be mandatory for all major platforms to have a Crowdtangle-like tool that reveals what URLs are being shared in high volumes, in real time. Dominique Delport / @domdelport : Be prepared for more disinformation online if @Meta drop @crowdtangle ... https://twitter.com/... Elise Thomas / @elisethoma5 : CrowdTangle has been super buggy and just not very useful for ages. I guess at least now we have confirmation of what we already knew: it's not being maintained the way it should be. https://twitter.com/... Dell Cameron / @dellcam : None of Facebook's claims about how it cracks down on misinformation are real. Probably tired of people noticing that. https://twitter.com/... Shayan Sardarizadeh / @shayan86 : It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster it'd be for fact-checkers and reporters if Meta ditched its research tool CrowdTangle for good. My list of stories where it helped our team pick up key misinformation narratives and patterns is very long. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Jesse Lehrich / @jesselehrich : pair this with more new reporting today from @daveyalba: Meta Pulls Support for Tool Used to Keep Misinformation in Check https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/... @_maargentino : This is extremely frustrating, crowdtangle was a crucial tool in my doctoral research, as I dug into the massive growth of QAnon in 2020, as well as gathering crucial data prior to and after J6. https://twitter.com/... @brianboland : @robleathern 100% correct! Should have been in a core product team. I was told later that none of the product leaders thought it was important enough to take on. Brandon Silverman / @brandonsilverm : @brianboland @robleathern I actually think there's a lot of advantages to being in an org that is entirely partner focused. It's either that or within an entire org dedicated entirely to transparency & data sharing. All the other options came with a lot of challenges. Rob Leathern / @robleathern : @brianboland Was it odd that it was in your org to begin with? Should it have been moved elsewhere? @brianboland : CrowdTangle was part of my organization when I was at Meta. I didn't see a commitment to meaningful transparency then and even less so now. Only empty promises. We need a US equivalent of the Digital Services Act that requires transparency for journalists and researchers. https://twitter.com/... Dr. Rebekah Tromble / @rebekahktromble : Meta is playing games with us. One minute they're committed to CrowdTangle; the next it's gone. Maybe, sort of, a little bit. This is a way to divide and wear down the community of researchers and journalists who care about holding Meta accountable. Don't fall for it. Davey Alba / @daveyalba : This story started with a q: wtf are people going to do if Facebook kills CrowdTangle and breaks researchers' internal tooling just in time for misinformation in the 2022 midterms? FB has never said before now that it would keep CT alive for midterms. https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kevin Whitelaw / @kevinwhitelaw1 : To protect elections from viral misinformation, researchers depend on a tool called CrowdTangle that Meta owns. But Meta wants to shut it down. https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @technology See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
CrowdTangle has been running on borrowed time for months: reporting says Meta began an official internal shutdown process in February but paused it as the EU's Digital Services Act gained traction, even as support and funding were quietly siphoned away. The tool's fragility is not new — Facebook had already admitted an error since at least May that accidentally removed thousands of Jan. 6 riot posts from CrowdTangle.
First-order effects
- Researchers and newsrooms tracking election misinformation lose reliable access in practice, since a tool kept alive only on pause with drained support cannot be planned around — the uncertainty itself is what Chris Bail and others flag as the risk.
- The DSA's momentum turns CrowdTangle from a discretionary Meta product into something closer to a compliance asset, forcing the company to keep funding a tool its internal process had slated for closure.
Second-order effects
- Brandon Silverman, who left Meta and helped craft a bipartisan transparency bill (reported in January), gains a concrete policy hook: lawmakers can point to Meta starving its own transparency tool as evidence that access needs legal guarantees.
- Any eventual replacement shapes the research field by design — as later coverage shows, Meta's Content Library successor serves academic and nonprofit researchers but not news outlets, deciding by policy who gets to watch the platform.
Third-order effects
- Platform transparency is shifting from goodwill tooling to regulated infrastructure: if the pattern holds, researcher access to social data will be set by statutes like the DSA rather than by product teams' roadmaps — consistent with Meta also disbanding its Responsible Innovation team and cutting a fact-checker comment project during layoffs.
The trend: Access to platform data for researchers and journalists is migrating from voluntarily maintained tools toward legally mandated infrastructure, with regulators increasingly setting the terms.