SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organizations and journalists to monitor social media posts, notably to track how misinformation spreads on the company's platforms.

The shutdown on Wednesday, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been met with protests from researchers and nonprofits. In May, dozens of groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Human Rights Watch and NYU’s Center for Social Media & Politics, sent a letter to the company requesting that it keep the tool operational through at least January so it would be available during the U.S. presidential elections.

“This decision compromises crucial pre- and post-election oversight mechanisms and undermines Meta’s transparency efforts during this critical period, especially at a time when social trust and digital democracy are alarmingly vulnerable,” the letter stated.

CrowdTangle, “has been a key tool in aiding researchers to sift through the vast amount of information on the platform and identify harmful content and threats,” it added.

In March, the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization, sent a similar letter to Meta requesting the company to maintain the tool, which was accessible free of charge, until January. That letter also garnered signatures from several dozen groups and individual academic researchers.

“For years, CrowdTangle has been an industry standard for real-time platform transparency. It has become vital for understanding how disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy," the Mozilla letter stated.

Meta has introduced an alternative to CrowdTangle, called the Meta Content Library. However, access to this library is restricted to academic researchers and nonprofits, excluding most news organizations. Critics have also expressed concerns that it is not as effective as CrowdTangle — at least not yet.

Nick Clegg, Meta's head of global affairs, explained in a blog post last week that the company has been receiving feedback on Meta Content Library from “hundreds of researchers in order to enhance its user-friendliness and assist them in finding the data they need for their research.”

Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016.