Transparency under threat: progress and setbacks between CrowdTangle and the Meta Content Library
- erickdau
- 8 hours ago
- 1 min read
In August 2024, Meta—the company responsible for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Messenger—discontinued CrowdTangle, a central tool for accessing data from its platforms and for journalistic and scientific investigations into the social impacts and risks associated with their use. The replacement with the Meta Content Library (MCL), made available at the end of the previous year, represented a structural change in the company's platform data monitoring, with significant implications for transparency and research autonomy.
This study compares the two tools, evaluating ten criteria related to access, available data, and resources, through the analysis of public documentation, policies and terms of use, and usability testing.
The results show that the MCL increased institutional and technical barriers: it restricted access to independent journalists and researchers, complicated registration, limited data extraction and export, reduced collaborative features, and imposed API use only in controlled environments (clean rooms), allowing only aggregated analyses to be exported and compromising research reproducibility.
We conclude that the MCL represents a setback in transparency and access to public data, subordinating the public interest to corporate control. This scenario highlights the need for regulatory policies that guarantee open access to data of public interest, preserving the independence of scientific research and investigative journalism.
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WARNING
This report is an independent production of NetLab UFRJ. All decisions regarding this work were made exclusively by the researchers of the laboratory. The funders of NetLab UFRJ have no influence on the laboratory's research agenda and did not participate in any stage of the production of this report.
Information on NetLab UFRJ's funding sources is available here
