Inside Facebook’s data wars

Written by Kevin Roose

One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.

Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and CEO, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day.