public health crises and natural disasters. Its dashboards helped people analyze and monitor in real-time the spread and engagement of public content on Facebook and Instagram (and at one point, Reddit and Twitter, too). This in turn helped Meta identify harmful trends and abuse on its platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has been reducing investment in CrowdTangle and has stopped onboarding new users. For many, the announcement on 14 March was not a surprise. Meta claims that its the decision to discontinue CrowdTangle is about meeting its regulatory requirements under the EU’s Digital Services Act: “Our data sharing products are evolving alongside technology and regulatory changes. Phasing out CrowdTangle will allow us to focus resources on our new research tools, Meta Content Library and Content Library API, which provide useful, high quality data to researchers.” We’re encouraged Meta is investing in the new Content Library — but abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle’s core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency at the heart of the Digital Services Act. The new Content Library may eventually be an effective replacement or even an improvement on CrowdTangle, but it is not currently fit for purpose as a tool to monitor elections. It lacks vital CrowdTangle features like automated insights to the interface, tools for benchmarking individual pieces of content, robust search flexibility, and more ways to automatically export data. Meta’s new data access program, run through the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), is fundamentally different from CrowdTangle: it is mainly focused on long-term, academic research, available through a clean room environment. In contrast, CrowdTangle’s immense value has been in providing real-time, public data to tens of thousands of public interest researchers, election administration officials and journalists across the world. For instance, in 2020, Meta provided CrowdTangle to election administration officials in all 50 US states to help them monitor for potential election interference or misinformation. They also made public dashboards available so it was easy to see what every major candidate was posting on their platforms. Those sort of resources were invaluable to helping protect the election and are now under threat of disappearing forever. Furthermore, at time of writing, relatively few researchers have access to the new Content Library: thousands of civil society organizations and journalists currently monitoring Facebook and Instagram through CrowdTangle simply do not have access to the new system, making it even more difficult for them to continue their vital work during elections. Moreover, suggesting that civil society groups and election integrity organizations should pay for expensive alternatives designed for marking & commercial purposes is not a realistic proposal. Abandoning CrowdTangle is essentially a resource allocation issue. Continuing to support CrowdTangle alongside the Content Library would not put Meta at risk of regulatory noncompliance.