On September 30th, the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Mozilla, and the Coalition for Independent Tech Research held a funeral for the demise of CrowdTangle.
The decision to host something so personal for a technology platform came after many months of collective organising efforts, calling on Meta to reverse course on their decision to kill CrowdTangle and improve the Meta Content Library. The coalition and our partners created the RIPCrowdTangle site to commemorate the platform and its contributions to the public’s right to know about online harms. The funeral felt like the next step in this commemoration of a platform that has such a deep impact on Independent technology research and our right to transparency from these platforms.
Below is an excerpt from Knight-Georgetown Institute’s in-depth blog about the day. Our friends at Tech Policy Press also edited the funeral into an excellent podcast where you can listen to the Eulogy, stories shared by the mourners at the funeral, and excerpts from our panel discussion about the road ahead on social media transparency. All details listed below.
Last week, a diverse community gathered to mourn the loss of CrowdTangle, Meta’s transparency tool that the company killed on August 14, 2024.
CrowdTangle meant so much to many researchers, scholars, advocates and the broader public. CrowdTangle, alongside similar, now-defunct tools and access points to analyze public social media data at Twitter/X and Reddit, have been essential for understanding many pressing information and communication issues taking place in online social spaces. CrowdTangle helped us track and understand misinformation, monitor human rights abuses, and generate news that people care about. Read more testimonials of how and why CrowdTangle mattered, here: https://www.ripcrowdtangle.com/.
The CrowdTangle funeral began with collective mourning. Associate professor and funeral host, Dave Karpf, acknowledged “It is a little weird holding a funeral for a piece of software.” But speakers lined up to describe how their work depended on this critical piece of software. Renowned technology journalist Julia Angwin delivered a moving eulogy highlighting the importance of CrowdTangle’s life.
Julia Angwin speaking at the funeralShe reminded us that “Crowdtangle did something essential: it allowed us to see what was on the public’s newsstand,” becoming “the best and only way to get a sense of what was happening on the biggest and most important social platform, Facebook.”Tied up in this importance was not only grief at the loss of CrowdTangle, but also the stinging reminder of why Meta chose to end access to CrowdTangle. Her “Ode to CrowdTangle” perfectly captured this spirit.
CrowdTangle’s demise is not the end of efforts to ensure public access to public platform data. A panel discussion with Rebekah Tromble and Alissa Cooper, moderated by our own Brandi Geurkink, underscored that a broad range of researchers and advocates are working to enable new forms of research that strengthen our collective understanding of the impacts of these platforms.
You can read the rest of the Knight-Georgetown Institute blog here. We highly recommend you also check our friends Tech Policy Press’s podcast here for more commentary from the panel and the Eulogy.
And once you’re done mourning, come and join us as a member where we’re organising and advocating for true transparency and independent oversight of the technology sector. Membership is open to academics, journalists, civil society researchers, and community scientists who engage in or support independent research focused on the impact of technology on society.