Facebook Knife’s CrowdTangle tool on a right-wing news issue

Facebook gutted its data analytics tool, CrowdTangle, by reassigning dozens of its employees and sidelining its CEO after its data showed inflammatory screeds and misleading right-wing page content routinely outperforms. traditional media on the news feed, according to the New York Times.

CrowdTangle, a Facebook affiliate, is one of the only ways to see Facebook metrics in the black box from outside the company. It offers data on how content is performing on pages and public groups in terms of “engagement” or how often a post is commented on, shared, liked, or receives a reaction emoji. It’s one of the only transparencies into Facebook’s viral economy that anyone without privileged access within the company gets.

CrowdTangle engagement data has shown for some time that links from far-right commentators like logical troll Ben Shapiro, former NRATV goon Dan Bongino and Fox News host Sean Hannity, as well as Far-right sites like Breitbart and Newsmax regularly score points. in the top 10 every day. This reinforces the (unquestionably correct But politically inconvenient) the idea that Facebook fostered the kind of toxic right-wing echo chamber that fueled things like a vigilante shot at a demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year or January 2021 Capitol Riots.

Since last year, Times technical columnist Kevin Roose has maintained a Twitter account showing the 10 public posts that generated the most engagement on Facebook, as measured by CrowdTangle every day. In a Times column on Wednesday, Roose explained that the account had become a source of consternation for Facebook executives, arguing that it was misrepresenting their site. A slew of other articles in the media, as good as university and association researchers, quoted CrowdTangle data in a series of unflattering stories about why Facebook was so inundated with right-wing content.

Facebook Executives Like News FEed leader John Hegeman began to push back, Roose wrote in The Times. Instead of ‘engagement’, they said, a a better metric would be “scope”, the total number of times Facebook users saw a post. CEO Marc Zuckerberg also pushed back, say Axios the idea that Facebook was a far-right trash can-the content farm was “just plain wrong”.

Eventually, according to the Times, Facebook executives began to consider that instead of making counterarguments (or God forbid, doing anything to solve the problem), they might try to do it. make it disappear by sticking a knife in CrowdTangle’s back.

In response to a September 2020 notice article in economist who cited CrowdTangle data to argue Facebook’s News Feeds biased partisan, and to Fox News and its more extreme cousin Breitbart in particular, according to the Times, the vice president of global communications, Jean Pinette, emailed other executives with the subject line, “The problem with CrowdTangle.” Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs, responded to the thread, stating: “our own tools help journalists solidify the bad story.” Vice President of Choice and Ccompetition David Ginsberg reportedly wrote that if Donald Trump were re-elected in 2020, “The media and our critics will quickly point to this ‘echo chamber’ as the main driver of the outcome.” Facebook app chief Fiji Simo replied, “I’m really worried that this may be one of the worst stories for us,“, Reports the Times.

When some of the executives would have pleaded for Facebook’s preferred reach data release, CrowdTangle co-founder and CEO Brandon Silverman responded that there was only one problem. Engineers at CrowdTangle had previously tested a scope data analysis tool and found that the data also showed the same kind of crap going up to the top, making it not “a total victory from a communications point of view.” .

According to the Times, Facebook’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics Alex Schultz was the most critical, saying there was no other option to “avoid stories like this” than switching from CrowdTangle to reports organized by Facebook. He would have wrote that “If we just commit to more self-service data, I think you will have different, exciting and negative stories. “

A Facebook spokesperson, Joe Osborne told The Times executives weren’t talking about taking CrowdTangle to a large farm in the upstate, but rather simply discussing how to correct the recording on how the media interpreted the data.

Again Facebook vice-president in charge of partnership strategy, Brian Boland, told the newspaper that by the time of the 2020 election, Facebook executives were clearly turning against CrowdTangle because of its role in unfavorable coverage. Boland, a proponent of greater transparency whose portfolio had included CrowdTangle, said he left Facebook in November 2020 because “the top management of the company is unwilling to invest in understanding the impact of its commodities “and” does not want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.

In April 2021, CrowdTangle chief Silverman told employees dozens of them would be reassigned to Facebook’s integrity division, the Times reports.. Silverman would added that he would no longer be involved in the day-to-day management of CrowdTangle. The Times reported that sources said he has since taken a leave of absence and no longer has a clearly defined job.

CrowdTangle is still available despite its devastated staff, and two people involved in the company’s plans told The Times they didn’t think Facebook was planning to pull it down anytime soon.

“CrowdTangle is part of a growing suite of transparency resources that we have made available to people, including academics and journalists,” Osborne told The Times. “With CrowdTangle joining our integrity team, we are developing a more comprehensive strategy on how we build on some of these transparency efforts moving forward. “

“People were excited about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles that Facebook didn’t like,” Boland told The Times. “Then the tone at the management level changed. “