Question 1

Is BSmeter a CrowdTangle alternative?

Accepted Answer

Honestly, no — not for CrowdTangle's actual job. CrowdTangle was a monitoring tool for finding and tracking what content was spreading across public Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit accounts, with dashboards, leaderboards, historical data, and an API. BSmeter has none of that. What BSmeter does is the verification step CrowdTangle deliberately left to humans: paste a video or podcast link and it transcribes the audio, extracts each verifiable claim, and scores it 0-100 against live web sources. If you're searching for a CrowdTangle alternative because you need trend monitoring, look at Meta Content Library or a third-party social listening tool. If you're here because you found something suspicious and want to know if it's true, that's what BSmeter is for.

Question 2

Why did CrowdTangle shut down, and what replaced it?

Accepted Answer

Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016 and retired it on August 14, 2024, pointing users to the Meta Content Library as its successor. The transition drew significant criticism from researchers and civil-society groups: the Content Library restricts access to people at qualified academic or nonprofit institutions pursuing scientific or public-interest research, which excludes most journalists, and reporting at the time found it lacked a number of CrowdTangle features including automated insights, content benchmarking, search flexibility, and export options. BSmeter had no part in any of this and doesn't attempt to fill that gap.

Question 3

Could I have used BSmeter and CrowdTangle together?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that would have been the natural pairing. CrowdTangle told you a video was surging across public accounts; BSmeter tells you whether the claims inside that video are accurate. Discovery, then verification. Since CrowdTangle is gone, the modern version of that workflow is whatever monitoring tool you've moved to — Meta Content Library, Newswhip, Junkipedia, or plain platform search — feeding links into BSmeter for the claim-level check. BSmeter is free to start, so it costs nothing to slot into whatever you're using now.