Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg-controlled social media company, has recently been at the center of controversy over a decision it took regarding a misinformation tracking tool. The company, weeks ago, said it wanted to shut down CrowdTangle, a public insights tool used to track or monitor what they said were irrelevant or low-quality social media posts that may have had potentially false information.
The decision has led to deep resentment among several non-profits that penned protest letters against the company’s move.
Meta kills off misinformation tracking tool CrowdTangle despite pleas from researchers, journalists https://t.co/pgpWpOUzUF
— Secrets and Spies Podcast 🌻🍸 (@SecretsAndSpies) August 15, 2024
Upset most by the change are some of these organizations, given that Meta will roll out a new tool, Content Library, free for “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions” engaged in scientific or public-interest research. In other words, it categorizes many journalists-the most active users of real-time data tracking to combat disinformation-out of the process.
A letter written back in May 2024, signed by nearly 50 organizations, urged Meta to keep CrowdTangle available until at least January 2025, with the upcoming presidential election. The signatories wrote to the company that its potential decision would weaken transparency on its platforms. They emphasized that it puts a very dangerous risk to the efforts being undertaken to trace and fight political misinformation, calls for violence, and targeting of vulnerable communities made through online means.
Among the organizations standing against Meta’s decision is the Mozilla Foundation. The company, best known for the Firefox web browser, also criticized Meta for a lack of transparency.
Mozilla had relied on CrowdTangle as a key tool for understanding how disinformation and hate speech spread on Facebook. Hence, it hoped Meta would keep it running through the 2024 election cycle.
The blowback notwithstanding, Meta went ahead with the planned shutdown on Aug. 14.
Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta, speaking at a technology conference in May, defended the decision, saying CrowdTangle showed a small sliver of what people are finding on the platforms, and it in reality did not show what people are reading. He even insinuated that the tool should have been taken down earlier.
The move by Meta might signal Zuckerberg and the company’s shift from political content, according to return managing editor Peter Gietl.
Making his point, Gietl said, “We’ve seen in interviews and recent reports that Zuckerberg is shying away from making big splashes in politics during the 2024 election cycle.”
“ “We see him at UFC events, jiu jitsu tournaments, and praising Donald Trump for being bad ass. It seems the company may be making a shift to focus on their technologies, like augmented reality, rather then trying to appease political activists,” he added of the Meta CEO.
In the same wavelength, the political donations from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have also taken a major plunge. Where reports indicate that political grants and awards affiliated to the couple have fallen to as low as $2.5 million — an amount way close to being a paltry in comparison to the $332 million they spent in 2020.
