CDT Joins Letter Urging Meta to Maintain CrowdTangle, Election Integrity Efforts in Advance of Historic Year of Elections
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) joined a coalition letter of over 90 civil society organizations and experts in response to Meta’s March 14, 2024 news that it would abandon CrowdTangle, the tool used by tens of thousands of journalists, watchdogs, and election observers to monitor the integrity of elections around the world.
This change would take effect August 14, 2024, ahead of elections in the United States, Brazil, and Australia and in the wake of elections in India, South Africa, and Mexico — endangering both pre- and post election monitoring in a year where over half the world’s population will go to the polls.
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Copied from the letter:
Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record. This means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It’s a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.
The below signatories call on Meta to:
- Keep CrowdTangle functioning until January 2025.
- Rapidly onboard all current CrowdTangle organizations that are focused on election integrity to the Content Library, including civil society organizations, researchers and qualifying news outlets – directly or through an accelerated application process.
- Engage in regular consultations with the global Crowdtangle community to ensure that the Content Library meets their needs, including maintaining full Crowdtangle functionality, before the tool is deprecated.
- As soon as possible, both the Content Library and CrowdTangle should add data about any election-related labels that are attached to public content by Meta, especially fact-checking and voter-interference.
For years, CrowdTangle has represented an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy. It’s also used by researchers and human rights groups to study war crimes, human rights violations, public health crises and natural disasters. Its dashboards helped people analyze and monitor in real-time the spread and engagement of public content on Facebook and Instagram (and at one point, Reddit and Twitter, too). This in turn helped Meta identify harmful trends and abuse on its platforms.
Unfortunately, Meta has been reducing investment in CrowdTangle and has stopped onboarding new users. For many, the announcement on 14 March was not a surprise.
