Meta kills a powerful transparency tool ahead of Election Day
Facebook’s parent company announced the death of CrowdTangle, an industry-leading platform that showed the platform's most viral posts
Yesterday, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced that it will soon sunset a critical transparency software used by journalists and researchers to track viral post engagement and page growth on its platforms. In an email to users, the company stated that its CrowdTangle tool will no longer be available after August 14th, 2024 - just twelve weeks out from Election Day.
While the company previously told us this day would eventually come, this is a major setback for everyone who cares about tech platform transparency and stemming the flow of political misinformation. We’ll break down why it matters in this week’s FWIW. But first….
By the numbers
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $10.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Capitalizing on the success of his energetic State of the Union performance last week, President Biden’s team has launched a massive online advertising campaign to take over various corners of the internet. They spent nearly $800,000 on Facebook and Instagram alone, where they’re targeting voters with messaging about lowering healthcare costs, protecting women’s reproductive rights, and contrasting his positions with Donald Trump. You can scroll through their latest ads here >>
Most of these ads target voters in eight core swing states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina) and blue-leaning Minnesota. They are also targeting Nebraska and Maine, where a couple of electoral votes will be on the table in November.
In addition to Facebook and Instagram, the Biden campaign has bought takeovers of different online sites and platforms, blanketing the Roku homepage in several swing states and chasing the President’s campaign stops with homepage advertising on local news sites.
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $4.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), running for re-election in battleground Wisconsin, is up with new ads on YouTube touting her efforts to support American manufacturing. Her latest video ad nods to American competition with China and highlights her work with Trump and Biden to pass legislation for Wisconsinites.
On Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $429,800 on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
…and lastly, here are the top spending political advertisers on X (formerly Twitter) in 2024:
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Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how weekly digital ad spending (Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube) compares between the Trump and Biden campaigns year-to-date:
As I noted above, the Biden campaign spent more last week than in any other seven-day period this year. To date, they’ve outspent the Trump campaign by $9.1 million to $1.2 million on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube.
Are the vibes shifting?
After President Biden’s solid State of the Union address last week, it seems like the mainstream media's pessimism about his candidacy may be starting to wane. If this election is about vibes, is this the beginning of a vibe shift? Brian Derrick, Glennis Meagher, and Keith Edwards break down Biden’s new momentum + more in this week’s episode of Vibes Only. Listen here >>
Meta kills key transparency tool ahead of November
Yesterday, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced that it will soon sunset a critical transparency software used by journalists and researchers to track viral post engagement and page growth on its platforms. In an email to users, the company stated that its CrowdTangle tool will no longer be available after August 14th, 2024 - just twelve weeks out from Election Day.
While the company previously told us this day would eventually come, this is a major setback for everyone who cares about tech platform transparency and stemming the flow of political misinformation. Here’s why:
What is CrowdTangle and what is it used for?
CrowdTangle is an unprecedented transparency platform primarily used for monitoring what’s receiving the most engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.) on Facebook. It was created as an independent company by Brandon Silverman in 2011 and acquired by Facebook in 2016. One of its original uses was to help media publishers identify which of their posts were performing well and to identify good brand influencers.
A PR disaster for Facebook
After the 2016 election - and all the Big Tech issues that came with it - journalists began using CrowdTangle to point out a lot of the nasty stuff (misinformation, foreign interference, inflammatory or hateful content) that was spreading organically on Facebook.
In the lead-up to 2020, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose later created the “Facebook’s Top 10” Twitter account, where he would chronicle on a daily basis how the top-performing posts on Facebook consistently came from far-right sources like Breitbart or The Daily Wire. That was a bad look for the company, and conversations started at the highest levels of Meta on how to change the perception of the data CrowdTangle provided or to kill the software altogether. They chose the latter. Roose reported on the conversations leading up to this decision in 2021. At that time, Meta began to restrict access to the tool and broke up the team of employees who maintained it.
Over the past few years, I’ve used Crowdtangle to identify shady networks of connected pro-MAGA pages, quantify the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, and spotlight the enormous engagement that some MAGA politicians have received on Facebook. I’ve used the tool to quantify the viral impact of key political moments, like last year’s fight for the Speakership or the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. While political engagement on Facebook has been on the decline in recent years, CrowdTangle was still a valuable tool I used on a regular basis, and I’m extremely sad to see it go.
A major step backward
Without this CrowdTangle, Meta will face far less scrutiny from independent journalists and researchers, which will no doubt give their PR flacks a sigh of relief.
As part of their decision to shut down CrowdTangle, the company has offered a consolation prize, providing only university-affiliated researchers with restricted access to a new “Meta Content Library.” According to Casey Newton, there are only about 100 researchers currently with access to that tool. I believe restricting access to their new transparency platform was a bait and switch by Meta - as they know full well that Ivory Tower academics (1) take months to publish their research, (2) are less attuned to the political impact of their work, and (3) prefer burying their findings in lengthy PDFs over shareable news content online.
The end of CrowdTangle is just another example of Meta’s pivot away from politics. They’ve deprioritized political content on Facebook, and have recently said they will make similar moves on Instagram and Threads. They’ve gutted internal teams related to platform integrity, and they are already failing to enforce their own political rules.
If action on their platforms this year causes a major political crisis, I fear we’ll all be less prepared, and the company has already shown it is not willing to “lean in” to solutions.
More reading:
From around the internet:
Generative AI tool Midjourney is blocking users from creating images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, according to the Associated Press.
Donald Trump decided to make the flip-flop of the century and oppose a ban on TikTok, likely because he wants to drive a wedge between younger voters and President Biden. POLITICO reports that his switch may be related to a corrupt deal with a billionaire backer.
Rep. Jeff Jackson, a digitally savvy Congressman from NC, is facing a pile-on from TikTok users who are criticizing his vote on the TikTok forced sale legislation this week.
Content about Project 2025 (Trump allies’ effort to transform the country and federal government into a right-wing hellscape if he’s elected) has been popping off online.
Ron DeSantis started beef with his one-time friend @LibsofTikTok’s Chaya Raichik on X/Twitter after Raichik allegedly spread misinformation about Florida law.
One more thing: Trump’s Veepstakes take a weird turn
You may remember Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s governor who continues to be desperately clinging to the hope that she might be Trump’s VP pick. Well, she certainly captured some attention this week… just probably not in the way she hoped. Noem posted an absolutely bizarre video that appears to be an ad for a cosmetic dentistry office in Texas.
Noem claims that she had her teeth fixed after they were damaged in a past biking incident, and it is unclear if this video was part of her payment for treatment in any form. #Teethgate seems like it might just be getting started, however: Travelers Advocacy, a consumer advocacy group, is now suing Noem over the lack of proper ad disclosure.
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