Central Louisiana News

U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Chris Coons (D-DE), and 15 other members have expressed concerns regarding Meta's decision to discontinue access to CrowdTangle, a transparency tool used by researchers and journalists to study public content on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. In a letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the senators highlighted the limitations of Meta Content Library, which is intended to replace CrowdTangle, and urged Meta to extend access to CrowdTangle for an additional six months while improvements are made.

"In light of threats to our national security, growing concern about the effect of social media on our children and their mental health, the advent and proliferation of generative artificial intelligence, and important elections coming up in the United States and elsewhere in the world, Meta (like other platforms) has a responsibility to ensure that the public, independent researchers, journalists, and policymakers can study and address the impact that platforms and their algorithms are having in these and other dimensions, in both positive and negative ways," wrote the members.

The letter emphasized that after August 14, 2024, CrowdTangle will no longer be accessible. The senators acknowledged that "CrowdTangle data has been the basis of hundreds of academic research papers (including in Nature and Science) and has been referenced in thousands of news articles by journalists reporting on social media and other topics."

Cassidy and Coons were joined by U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), John Cornyn (R-TX), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Peter Welch (D-VT), Edward Markey (D-MA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Mark Warner (D-VA), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM); U.S. Representatives Lori Trahan (D-MA-03), Neal Dunn (R-FL-02), Anna Eshoo (D-CA-16), Sean Casten (D-IL-06), Adam Schiff (D-CA-30), and Seth Moulton (D-MA-06) in signing the letter.

Last year, Cassidy, Coons, and four Senate colleagues introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA). This bill would require social media companies to share more data with the public and researchers. A section of PATA specifically mandates major platforms provide a tool similar to CrowdTangle for studying public content.

The letter further detailed that while Meta Content Library offers some advantages over CrowdTangle—such as greater data context—it also has significant limitations. These include a lack of historical time-series data necessary for reproducible searches, restrictive data retention policies, limited interfaces for researcher collaboration, fewer insight capacities, less accessibility for those without data science backgrounds, among others.

The senators questioned why Meta is ending access to CrowdTangle at such a critical time for social media use. They requested written responses from Zuckerberg addressing these concerns before August 12, 2024.