Dear Friend –

We're 187 days away from the U.S. presidential election, and Meta is planning to shut down one of its most valuable transparency tools, CrowdTangle. It's unacceptable.

The online tool exposed a massive political misinformation campaign, revealing Russian influence on Facebook in 2016 [1] – and shortly after the election, Facebook acquired CrowdTangle to monitor and flag other attempts at manipulation and to analyze patterns of how dangerous misinformation spreads on their platform.

But now, Meta is planning to sunset CrowdTangle in August of this year. Given the upcoming elections in November and the known election manipulation operations we’ve seen in previous years, this is very bad news for the future of our democracy. Meta is disabling a key tool used to detect data manipulation, misinformation, and the spread of hate exactly when it matters most: just weeks before the next presidential election.

Click here to sign the petition and tell Meta: Drop your plans to kill off CrowdTangle.

SIGN THE PETITION

Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit independent researchers and journalists, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening platform-wide on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record.

This all comes on top of Facebook’s own admission in 2021 that “core parts of its platform appear hardwired for spreading misinformation and divisive content” – and very little has been done since then to fix this problem. [2]

Facebook and its parent company Meta bear a responsibility to be transparent and help stop the spread of lies and misinformation designed towards manipulating our elections. Dropping the CrowdTangle tool right before election season is a giant step in exactly the wrong direction.

Please speak out today and tell Meta: Cancel your plans to drop the Crowdtangle tool.

Thank you for speaking out today to help hold Facebook accountable,

Nicole Gill
Co-founder and Executive Director
Accountable Tech

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Sources:

Wired: Shadow Politics: Meet the Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News
The Guardian: Facebook admits site appears hardwired for misinformation, memo reveals

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