CrowdTangle was a social-media analytics platform founded in 2011 by Brandon Silverman and Matt Garmur, originally built to help organizers and nonprofits track how their content spread on 📝Facebook and other social networks. It was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in November 2016 and over the next several years became the de facto research and journalism tool for studying public Facebook and Instagram content.
The tool surfaced engagement metrics, leaderboards, and viral-content alerts across public pages, groups, and verified accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and (briefly) Reddit, and was distributed for free to academic researchers, newsrooms, election-integrity teams, and watchdog organizations. CrowdTangle's transparency over Meta's own platforms made it both an essential tool for misinformation research and a recurring source of friction inside the company, particularly around what its data revealed about the reach of partisan and low-quality content. Meta shut CrowdTangle down on August 14, 2024 and pointed users toward its newer Meta Content Library, a change widely criticized by researchers as a meaningful reduction in transparency.