During Australia's recent federal election, Chris Cooper's team tracked how anti-trans hate speech and misinformation surged on social media, and in particular Facebook.
They found content that actively misgendered trans people was attracting significant engagement, and even growing followers for some influencers and groups intent on spreading this message.
To do this work, Cooper's Reset Australia — a group that aims to hold big tech accountable — used a little-known tool called CrowdTangle.
Owned by Meta's Facebook, the free service operates something like a search engine.
It helps academics, journalists and civil society groups dig into what's taking place on Facebook and Instagram, and allows them to identify trending posts and monitor the dissemination of disinformation.
But in June, Bloomberg reported that Facebook plans to eventually pull support for CrowdTangle.
Already some local CrowdTangle users have found the platform increasingly buggy and producing inconsistent results, echoing similar reports of instability overseas.
Mr Cooper said his team was occasionally finding erratic results on CrowdTangle — small errors that looked to them like a lack of maintenance.
"They're almost small enough to not warrant action, but they're consistent and kind of pernicious," he said.
According to Bloomberg, Meta began an internal process to wind back CrowdTangle in February, but paused it during debate over the European Union's Digital Services Act (this unprecedented regulation will require major technology platforms to share key data with researchers).
CrowdTangle is still on track to be wound down, the outlet reported, and some Facebook engineers have been "tasked [with] killing it".
The team has already shed staff: CrowdTangle staff were reportedly reassigned in mid-2021, and the former chief executive left Facebook in October.
"We've been looking at all of the different products we offer to help researchers understand the impact of our platform, and discussing ways that we can make these tools even more valuable for them," a Meta spokesperson said.
But experts say losing CrowdTangle could limit transparency and compromise their ability to track and understand the spread of disinformation and extremism in Australia.
'An uncontrollable source of possible negative stories'
While it has been celebrated as a key transparency tool — and one that many other comparable platforms don't offer — CrowdTangle has long been a source of embarrassing stories for Facebook.
The company's leaders have been increasingly punchy in their attempts to direct attention away from sticky questions about unhealthy content on the platform, and towards new projects like the so-called metaverse.
Acquired in 2016, CrowdTangle has been used by journalists — including the ABC — to expose the spread of COVID-19 disinformation, and even to highlight how much more engagement far-right news commentators have received compared to mainstream news content.
A Twitter account launched by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose in mid-2020 has demonstrated this phenomenon.
The bot publishes a daily list of the top-performing Facebook links in the US and has been a source of tension that has at times spilled out in public.
Facebook executives have long pointed out that engagement on these top posts — reactions and comments — is not the same as reach or how many people saw it.
Instead, in 2021 Facebook began sharing its own widely-viewed content reports that list the most popular posts. This is data Facebook doesn't share in CrowdTangle, and so it can't be vetted.
But the difference between being able to independently track popular content — and simply being told what's most popular — is at the heart of concerns about CrowdTangle's potential demise.
"CrowdTangle is basically an uncontrollable source of possible negative stories," said Francesco Bailo, who researches digital and social media in politics at UTS.
Dr Bailo and his team at UTS are currently using the tool to track public Facebook pages that share anti-vaccine content. For now, he has seen no problems with the data, but maintains it is essential.
"If Facebook shuts down CrowdTangle, then of course we lose access to the only way into the Facebook database, the Facebook content, that is not mediated by the Facebook recommender system," he said.
CrowdTangle is already a tool with limitations, according to Axel Bruns, professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology.
It only allows tracking of public Facebook pages and groups, and doesn't provide access to comments on posts — which are often a key vector for the spread of disinformation.
"What we have now is kind of the tip of the iceberg. It's the public spaces on Facebook and nothing else," he said.
Dr Bruns is tracking news pages for an upcoming research project, and is monitoring Facebook posts that link to Australian media domains.
On some days, his team is likely to collect up to 4,500 or more Facebook posts, but on random days in earlier years, that number drops significantly in their dataset, pointing to a potential discrepancy in the historic data.
"It's not conceivable that from one day to another there suddenly wouldn't be any links to Australian news sites and public spaces on Facebook," he said.
"So clearly something's missing."
Dr Bruns is in touch with the CrowdTangle team, who are trying to help fix the problem.
The transparency question
If Facebook does finally kill off CrowdTangle, there are worries that data access will be restricted to researchers and research projects approved by Facebook — and might necessarily exclude journalists.
It's unclear what steps, if any, Australian government or regulators might take if CrowdTangle is wound down, but transparency has regularly been cited in parliamentary scrutiny of the major platforms.
A voluntary Australian code of practice on disinformation launched in 2021 (and overseen by ACMA) includes the objective that platforms should support "the efforts of independent researchers to improve public understanding of Disinformation".
Meta's current commitment under the code to combating disinformation includes that CrowdTangle is freely available to journalists, third-party fact-checking partners and some academics.
An ACMA spokesperson said the agency was "aware of public reporting around the future of CrowdTangle".
"[ACMA] would encourage Meta to continue to provide access to platform data to these groups to allow them to monitor dis- and misinformation on Meta's services."
While the code has been criticised for its lack of bite, ACMA is seeking reserve powers in the event that self-regulation is inadequate, including "the ability to formally request information from platforms including Australia-specific data on the effectiveness of measures to address disinformation and misinformation".
Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said in a statement that the Government is "giving careful consideration" to ACMA's 2021 report on the code, which recommended it be provided with information-gathering powers.
Stevie Zhang, associate editor of the Information Futures Lab in the Asia Pacific, has used CrowdTangle to monitor top posts and assess how far a particular piece of misinformation — about Covid-19 lockdowns, for example — has spread.
Zhang emphasised it is really the only publicly accessible tool available to investigate content on Facebook at scale — without breaking the company's terms of service, at least.
"At the end of the day, we're trying to work with the platforms to make the platforms, essentially, a good place for users to be," they said.
