CrowdTangle

Supporting independent research through data access, training, and resources is critical to understanding the spread of public content across social media and to providing transparency into Facebook’s platforms. That’s why we’re excited to announce that CrowdTangle has now opened a public application for university-based researchers and academics.

Over the past year, CrowdTangle has been expanding its program for academics and researchers in beta. In that time, CrowdTangle has been used by researchers to study everything from Russian-linked influence operations in Africa to the spread of misinformation in European elections. Over 250 research teams at universities across the globe currently use the tool to support their research work, and more than 50 research publications have cited CrowdTangle data in the past year. The Stanford Internet Observatory recently shared how their work using CrowdTangle helped lead to a takedown of 76 accounts across 6 countries.

Now, we’re making more of this type of work possible by opening applications to university-based researchers at the faculty, PhD, or post-doctoral level, and who are focused on misinformation, elections, COVID-19, racial justice, and well-being. If accepted, researchers will receive access to all of CrowdTangle’s tools and API, as well as training and resources to support their research.

CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Facebook that makes it easy to follow, analyze, and report on what’s happening across social media. CrowdTangle started a pilot program in 2019 to partner with researchers and academics and help them study critical topics such as racial justice, misinformation, and elections. In addition to launching an online application, we’ve built a new hub with information about all Facebook data sets that are available for independent research.