Despite calls for social-media platforms to increase transparency (see, for example, C. Budak et al. Nature 630, 45–53; 2024), researchers now have few tools to understand the potential harms of the online world. On 14 August, Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a tool that gave researchers and journalists easy access to data from Facebook and Instagram. Early last year, X, then known as Twitter, removed free access to its application programming interface, which allowed researchers to collect data.
Competing Interests
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The author declares no competing interests.