Say goodbye to one of your most valuable tools for Facebook analysis, social media managers: CrowdTangle, the Facebook and Instagram content analysis platform, tracks Pages and accounts, giving you insight into their activities, monitoring their content trends, engagement behaviors, and many more.

Yes, this week, we bid farewell to CrowdTangle, the Facebook and Instagram content analysis platform that allows you to track Pages and accounts, garner insight into their activity, monitor content trends, engagement behaviors, and many more.
I use CrowdTangle every day and have been able to really dig deep to find unique insights on Pages, profiles, and groups using its excellent "Intelligence" tools, which allows you to compare different elements over time.

Honestly, it's one of my personal favorites-it's such a shame that Meta has decided to discontinue it. But just as its retreat from political content is essentially an effort to reduce the level of public scrutiny of its platforms, which spooks investors and sends its share price down, changing engagement trends have prompted Meta to conclude it's just too much bother to carry political news in particular, while CrowdTangle has also been used to facilitate hostile research reports about its apps.

The most telling instance was the "Facebook Top 10" profile on X, a bot account that Kevin Roose, a New York Times journalist, engineered to point out the day's hottest Facebook posts-according to listings he sourced from CrowdTangle. These were usually held on by right-wing spokespeople and Pages, which created an impression that Facebook was deliberately or via some algorithmic process amplifying this sort of content (note: the "Facebook's Top 10" account stopped posting in June last year due to changes to X's API access).

For instance, Facebook rejected the notion that it was profiting from such engagement based on posts that would often contain bare-faced falsehoods among a series of headlines. To further deflect the implication, the Facebook had put out its "Widely Viewed Content Report." With that, it also increased internal review of the CrowdTangle team, and what one could access via the application. 

From this, the management of Meta expressed concerns about the tool and this led to most members of the CrowdTangle team being axed back in 2021.

Well, many had held expectations that would be the last time the crowd tap app lived on, but it went on, and then in March of this year, Meta announced that the last day for the platform would be August 14th.
Meta has put the CrowdTangle product on ice, citing changes in regulatory and technology requirements that necessitate a higher level of security over the access and control of data. In other words, the tool now has lost fit for purpose, referring users to the content library, along with the content library API, and the ads library.

Which are not the same and neither gives an access to CrowdTangle's research capability in a direct, user-friendly UI. The Content Library is also accessible only to authorized researchers approved through Meta's new process; therefore, very few journalists and external analysts are going to be granted such access either way.

Which means fewer checks on Facebook and IG trends, and lesser insight into what's trending at any given time. And that, in the language of social media marketing, is a big negative, and CrowdTangle would be a big loss for many who would like to stay ahead of the curve, and track in-depth, Page performance.

But it is going. Right now, CrowdTangle shows a note that says August 14th is going to be its last day of operation, so tomorrow's going to be effectively its final day of existence.   It's frustrating to lose such a valuable tool, but simply means that social media folk have to get a little smarter with the tools they do still have available.