CrowdTangle is crucially important to researchers internationally. I mourn its loss as it will have a profound impact on our ability to scrutinize power, not just that of the platforms, but corporations and politicians who seek to manipulate and deceive us all.

Without a window into the platforms, it's next to impossible to tell how far and wide false claims have circulated and whether other fabrications are gaining traction. In shutting down CrowdTangle, Meta closed the small window that we once had.

As a fact-checking journalist, I used CrowdTangle every day. In one story, I used it to analyze the trend of staged dramatic videos posted by verified Facebook accounts in India and how such videos are often used to target minorities, especially the Muslim community. When Meta pulls the plug from CrowdTangle, Mark Zuckerberg makes it clear he does not want Meta to be held accountable to keep our internet safe.

CrowdTangle was instrumental to my public health research. I used it for several tobacco control studies. Shutting down this tool will be a huge loss to researchers. The new tool they are offering simply does not have the flexibility needed, especially to facilitate qualitative content analysis.

For the past several years, we have used CrowdTangle to gather the posts of candidates for national office in democracies all around the world in order to study the negative effects of populism on democracy. Without access, this research, funded by both NSF and the Carnegie Corporation, has now ended.

The CrowdTangle browser plugin was one of the most useful tools for identifying inauthentic networks on Facebook. It was a "one click and have the network mapped out" tool. And it was essential in my work identifying networks which Meta later actioned. There really is no replacement for it.

As a fact checker and social media researcher in South Asia, CrowdTangle was a tool that I used daily, it helped me track far-right accounts in India during the elections and COVID pandemic, similarly during the 2019 bombing in Sri Lanka and so on.

The Civic Tech Lab at National University of Singapore used CrowdTangle to access multi-lingual and multi-modal content on issues such as Covid-19 and StopAsianHate. Following the closure of CrowdTangle, platforms' doors to researchers from the Global South are shut even further.

We have been using CrowdTangle to monitor Turkish news and pinpoint disinformation and propaganda campaigns, especially during elections. Now we are largely unable to do it.

Tools like CrowdTangle were the public's lens into the digital dynamics shaping democracy, revealing the interplay between Meta's platforms and societal discourse. Its unilateral removal underscores just how distant we remain from a tech governance model that prioritizes the common good.

My team has used CrowdTangle to collect public political communication around elections in Finland, from both parties, individual candidates and NGOs, on Facebook and Instagram. CrowdTangle provided an easy and reliable way to access such data, also in ways and formats accessible for non-computational team members.

As an independent researcher who has no funding, I rely on low-cost and easy access to data that CrowdTangle has provided. When it shuts down, I'll likely have to discontinue my work.

We used CrowdTangle to conduct research about how political candidates utilized different platforms for different mobilization efforts. We also used CrowdTangle to study news organizations and influencers. All of these individuals are public figures, and it has become much harder to systematically study them.

Our newsroom recently used CrowdTangle to expose a disinformation operation targeting the UK race riots on Facebook that was being managed out of Africa. Many of us here have used this tool before for similar investigations and we're concerned that Meta's replacement (the Meta Content Library) will make this kind of investigative work much harder with the replacement only being accessible to vetted researchers.

CrowdTangle has facilitated external evaluation of Facebook's attempts to control misinformation throughout the COVID pandemic. It enabled novel psycholinguistic research in how people make sense of social media, lending crucial external validity to scientific theory. It provided a transparent approach to studying coordinated inauthentic behavior. And so much more.

At the University of Wisconsin's Mass Communication Research Center we have used CrowdTangle to retrieve public-facing posts from Facebook and Instagram on topics like #MeToo, Gun Violence, Presidential Debates, Immigration, and Vaccines (HPV, COVID, MMR). Access loss will slow research on social media discourse flows and their consequences.

Heartbroken by CrowdTangle's shutdown. It has been essential for our organization, especially in news gathering during disasters like earthquakes, super typhoons, the pandemic, and the Philippines elections. It was our go-to tool for real-time, reliable information. Its loss is a huge blow to our work.

CrowdTangle allowed many different groups to use their expertise in protecting our online environment - they didn't need technical specialists, or to spend hours working out how to get data. But now Meta, like other tech companies, is choosing to make this valuable work much harder.

With CrowdTangle gone, our Top FIBers project at the Observatory on Social Media—which tracked Facebook's top superspreaders of low-credibility news content each month—can no longer continue. The tool's domain-specific search was essential; without it, we cannot sustain this critical public service as no viable alternatives exist.

CrowdTangle was a window into Facebook's impact on our society — a view that, in hindsight, might be why Meta found it so undesirable. This experience has shown me never to settle for voluntary access to that which makes accountability possible. Accountability requires obligatory transparency.

We used CrowdTangle for various research projects at GESIS; most recently for collecting data on the German candidates in the 2024 European Parliament election. CrowdTangle was easy to access and use, and I am currently skeptical whether the new Meta Content Library can fully replace it.

Through the Illuminating Project (illuminating.ischool.syr.edu), we have built an archive and dashboard of U.S. political campaign messaging to support research and reporting to hold politicians accountable. The end of CrowdTangle at the height of the U.S. campaign hinders our ability to support social science and journalistic efforts to promote transparency.