Over the past few months, Meta has gradually withdrawn its support for CrowdTangle, which was initially acquired as a tool for companies and publishers to measure social performance. In July 2021 the team was disbanded. Company CEO and founder Brandon Silverman stepped down in October. Silverman's farewell came after significant tensions with Meta's top management over the information CrowdTangle was making public. Immediately after the acquisition, CrowdTangle released some details on Russian influence in the 2016 US election, which took place, in part, thanks to the sharing of billions of posts on Facebook. In 2020, thanks to CrowdTangle, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose revealed, for example, that far-right commentators like Ben Shapiro or Sarah Palin achieved higher levels of engagement than traditional newspapers. He did it through his Twitter account "Facebook's Top 10" and later in a long article for the Times.Facebook executives were not thrilled with a publicly accessible system that could cause so many public relations crises. They preferred that the data acquired through CrowdTangle be published in the form of reports, so that the company could exercise more control over the messages they spread.
In January of this year, Meta stopped accessing CrowdTangle for new users, saying they have constraints in terms of staff. According to Bloomberg sources, fewer than five people worked on the team in recent months. Erin McPike, a spokesperson for Meta, told Bloomberg that the company will continue to offer support to researchers working on countering disinformation and that new, more functional tools will be designed. She added that CrowdTangle will continue to operate until the US midterm elections in November.