Meta to Replace Widely Used Data Tool—and Largely Cut Off Reporter Access

The social-media giant said it will decommission CrowdTangle in five months and is replacing it with a tool called the Meta Content Library, which will be available only to academic and nonprofit researchers, not to most news outlets.

CrowdTangle has been widely used by journalists, researchers and regulators seeking to understand social-media platforms and studying the viral spread of content including false information and conspiracy theories. Reporting based on data that the tool produced often caused frustration for Meta’s leaders, who have been gradually limiting the tool in recent years.

Meta has already started taking applications for access to the new tool, which it said it is continuing to develop. The company said it will be an upgrade over CrowdTangle, with features the old tool lacked, such as the ability to search content based on how widely it was viewed and to see data on public comments on posts.

Two researchers granted early access to the new system offered a mixed appraisal.

Cody Buntain, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, agreed that the new features are valuable, but said the new system lacks CrowdTangle’s ability to study social-media activity in specific geographic locations.

Buntain also raised concern about the timing of CrowdTangle’s planned termination, set for Aug. 14. While the advance notice will give researchers time to finish existing projects, closing it in the final months of 2024 U.S. election campaigning will almost certainly disrupt research into political activity on Facebook and Instagram.

“That’s really bad timing," he said.

Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, said that the Meta Content Library currently limits how much data search results can return, and that its privacy restrictions prevent users from downloading data on even public posts from elected officials.

“If carried through to their full potential, there are a lot of features that could make Meta’s Content Library a more powerful tool for social science," she said. “But we’re not there at the moment. Meta has a track record of making big promises to researchers, getting positive press coverage, and then backtracking."

In a Thursday statement announcing the planned end of CrowdTangle, Meta pledged that it would “continue to gather feedback from researchers and add new features and data sets over time."

Perhaps the biggest change from CrowdTangle will be who can use it. Academics and nonprofit organizations can apply for access to the content library, which will be hosted by the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. But for-profit organizations—which include most American news organizations—won’t be eligible. A Meta spokesman noted that other tools for tracking successful content on its platforms remain commercially available.

Researchers have voiced frustration about a lack of transparency on other social-media platforms as well. Even with the restrictions on its new tools, Meta said, its new tool will still provide more access to platform data than is available from rivals TikTok and Google’s YouTube, which generally give data access only to academics in the U.S. and Europe.

TikTok declined to comment and YouTube didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Facebook acquired CrowdTangle in 2016 to help news publishers track and emulate the highest-performing content on Facebook and other social-media platforms. The tool also proved useful to staffers inside the company studying subjects such as outperformance of content from small publishers pushing conspiracy theories, clickbait and material that ran afoul of Meta’s policies regarding pornography.

But CrowdTangle’s utility in spotting the viral success of controversial content on Facebook didn’t always endear it to Meta’s leadership.

Internal divisions came to a head after a New York Times journalist in 2020 set up an automated Twitter account that listed the most widely shared links on Facebook each day, highlighting the success that conservative political publishers enjoyed on the platform. Meta publicly pushed back against the daily updates, which it said weren’t the most widely viewed even though they drew heavy user engagement.

Ultimately, Meta disbanded the team that ran CrowdTangle in the summer of 2021. By early 2022, the company had cut off new CrowdTangle user registrations and was planning to shutter it entirely. It held off until it could build a replacement, however, in response to the Digital Services Act, a European law that includes transparency requirements for large internet platforms, according to people familiar with the matter.

Write to Jeff Horwitz at jeff.horwitz@wsj.com