From 2012 to 2021, I was the CEO and co-founder of CrowdTangle. The New York Times called CrowdTangle “perhaps the greatest transparency tool in the history of social media.”

CrowdTangle was a start-up that launched as a community organizing app but found product market fit as a social analytics tool. In 2013, we began working with news organizations to help them better understand how to share their stories on Facebook but within a few years, we had built a full suite of social analytics tools. At the end of 2016, we were acquired by Meta and officially joined on January 1st, 2017. Over the course of 4 years at Meta, CrowdTangle grew to become one of the most prominent and widely-used transparency tools in the world. 

Some coverage over the years:

• Platformer: How CrowdTangle predicted the future
• Mozilla: Over 150 civil society organizations around the world urge Meta to keep CrowdTangle’s overall functionality
• Fast Company, “The Secret Tool that Buzzfeed, Upworthy and Everyone Else Is Using to Win Facebook”
• The Verge, “Facebook Buys CrowdTangle”
• Adweek, “CrowdTangle Is Partnering with Local News”
• Poynter, “CrowdTangle now let’s partners report false news”
• Global Investigative Journalism Network, “My Favorite Tool’s with Craig Silverman”
• Facebook Newsroom, “CrowdTangle opens up applications for academics”
• Vox, “How researchers are trying to study misinformation about COVID”
• Social Media Today, “Meta Launches New Initiative to Share Data on Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior with More Researchers” 
• The New York Times, “Facebook Data Wars”
• ABC News Australia, “CrowdTangle lets researchers track Facebook disinformation. So why’s it on Meta’s chopping block?”
• The Verge, “Platforms May Finally Have To Start Sharing Data”
• Protocol, “Why Big Tech’s best transparency tool is dying“
• Rappler, “Why possible loss of CrowdTangle worries fact-checkers and disinformation researchers” 

• Bloomberg, “Meta Pulls Support for Tool Used to Keep Misinformation in Check”
• Poynter, “Meta won’t comment on its plans to abandon CrowdTangle”