Technology

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Meta announced last month that it would replace CrowdTangle with the “Meta Content Library,” a less powerful tool that will not be made available to media companies.

That will help China, Russia, and other autocratic countries that seek to sow political division in the United States, said Nathan Doctor, senior digital methods manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“With these sorts of foreign influence campaigns, probably the biggest thing about them is to keep tabs on them. Otherwise, as we see, they can start to flourish. So as data access…dries up a bit, it becomes a lot more difficult in some cases to identify this kind of stuff and then you know, reactively deal with it, Doctor said on Monday during a Center for American Progress online event.

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That shows that social media companies don’t feel much accountability to policy-makers, the press, or the publice, Brandi Geurkink, the executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, said Monday.

“In arguably the largest global election year ever, the fact that a company can…signal their intention to make such a decision and then have such a groundswell of opposition from civil society all around the globe, from lawmakers in the United States and Europe, from journalists, you name it, and continue to go ahead with this decision and not really respond to any of the criticism—that's what I think is the bigger worrying piece,” she said.