CrowdTangle

CrowdTangle
Name	CrowdTangle
Type	Social media analytics
Founded	2011
Founder	Brandon Silverman, Matt Garmur, Phil Marbach
Parent	Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.)
Industry	Technology, Media monitoring

CrowdTangle CrowdTangle is a social media monitoring and analytics tool used to track engagement across public content on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. It is deployed by newsrooms, research institutions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies to analyze trends, measure reach, and surface influential posts from public pages and profiles. The platform has informed reporting by outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, The Guardian, and been cited in research from institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Overview

CrowdTangle aggregates public posts, shares, reactions, comments, and video metrics to create dashboards, leaderboards, and alerts. Journalists at organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, NPR, and Associated Press use its visualization and search capabilities alongside datasets from Pew Research Center, Oxford Internet Institute, Columbia University, and University of Oxford. Advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Electronic Frontier Foundation have leveraged it for campaign tracking. Researchers from University of California, Berkeley, New York University, and University of Pennsylvania have combined CrowdTangle outputs with methods from Media Studies, Computational Social Science, and Network Science.

History and development

Founded in 2011 by entrepreneurs Brandon Silverman, Matt Garmur, and Phil Marbach, CrowdTangle initially focused on tracking viral content across social networks and grew through adoption by newsrooms including BuzzFeed, Vice Media, HuffPost, Vox Media, and Politico. In 2016, the company announced partnerships and expanded APIs used by teams at CNN, Fox News, and Al Jazeera. In 2016–2017 it drew attention during investigations into misinformation tied to events such as the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum, prompting scrutiny from legislators like members of the United States Congress and inquiries from regulators including the Federal Trade Commission and the Information Commissioner's Office. In 2016 CrowdTangle was acquired by Facebook, later renamed Meta Platforms, Inc., leading to integration with Meta products and evolving feature sets used by internal teams at Meta for content oversight and by external partners including NewsGuard and academic projects at MIT Media Lab and Data & Society.

Features and functionality

CrowdTangle offers dashboards, alerts, leaderboards, timeline charts, search, and historical post indexing. It provides APIs consumed by developers at organizations such as NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times Company, and research groups at Stanford Internet Observatory and Oxford Internet Institute. Users can filter and sort posts from public entities including Politico, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, CNN International, and Sky News to surface high-engagement content. Analytics include engagement totals, cross-platform comparisons for Facebook Pages, Instagram Accounts, YouTube Channels, and Twitter Accounts, and insights used alongside tools like Tableau, Google BigQuery, Python, and R (programming language). Alerts can be configured for spikes related to events such as the 2020 United States presidential election, COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and major sporting events like the FIFA World Cup.

Use cases and impact

Newsrooms employ CrowdTangle to monitor breaking stories and verify sourcing, informing coverage by outlets like The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times. Academics use it to study misinformation, virality, and network cascades in projects at Harvard Kennedy School, Yale University, and Princeton University. NGOs and public health organizations including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, and UNICEF have tracked public messaging during crises. Political campaigns and advocacy organizations use leaderboards and trend analyses during contests involving figures like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Narendra Modi, and Boris Johnson. The platform’s data has supported investigative reporting into coordinated inauthentic behavior, manipulative networks linked to events such as the 2018 Brazilian general election and operations examined in reports by Graphika and DFRLab.

Privacy, ethics, and controversies

CrowdTangle’s access to public content raised debates about data access, platform responsibility, and transparency involving Facebook/Meta. Privacy advocates at Electronic Frontier Foundation and scholars at Data & Society highlighted concerns about third-party scraping and use in political targeting following revelations about data use in controversies involving firms like Cambridge Analytica. Journalists and researchers questioned differential access between verified partners and independent scholars; this prompted discussions with organizations such as OpenAI and policy makers in the European Union and United Kingdom on data governance. Legal and ethical scrutiny has involved regulators like the Federal Trade Commission and parliamentary committees in inquiries into social media’s role in elections and public discourse.

Integration and platform support

CrowdTangle integrates with social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, and Reddit, and supports export formats ingestible by Google Sheets, Excel, Tableau, and cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Newsroom workflows connect CrowdTangle outputs to content management systems used by organizations such as The New York Times Company, The Washington Post Company, and Gannett. Academic teams combine its data with web archives like Internet Archive and analytical environments at Harvard Dataverse and ICPSR for reproducible research.

Category:Social media analytics