• CrowdTangle is not available for classroom learning. Please do not put students who are not research assistants into the account.
• Do not provide raw data to anyone outside of your account. You can share the findings, but not the data. If a journal asks for data to verify findings, you may send a CSV, but it cannot be posted publicly, and they must delete it after verification. 
• If you have a collaborator at another university, you may add them to the Dashboard for that project. Once they want to start a different project, they need to apply for their own account.
• Do not monetize the data.
• Do not create an API tool that allows non-CrowdTangle users to manipulate the CrowdTangle database.

Logging in:

Please accept the email invite by authenticating with your personal Facebook account, to create a unique user login ID for you. After that first login, please disregard the email link (it won’t work) and instead log in at: https://apps.crowdtangle.com/

Inviting your colleagues:

Your account is for faculty, PhD, and post-docs at your university. You can invite colleagues at your university in two ways.

• Quick way: In the Dashboard view, choose Settings>Invite User (this will only invite them to that specific dashboard).
• Better way: In the Dashboard view, choose Settings>Account Settings>Users (this way you can invite them to all your dashboards at once, and promote them to Team owner status if helpful).
• This article explains how to manage user access and create “Teams” for different divisions of your organization. If you are not an account owner and need help making a team, please email me. Please create your own dashboards for your projects rather than using existing dashboards, and keep them in your Team for access control. 

Resources (send these to anyone who missed the onboarding):

• Getting Started: Recorded demo of CrowdTangle for Academics and Researchers.
• Internal Academics hub with case studies and code resources (only available to people with a CrowdTangle Academics account)
• API cheat sheet and a broader API overview
• CrowdTangle Codebook
• Academics & Researchers FAQs
• Information on the data we track (including some representativeness data)
• Citing CrowdTangle
• Graph API endpoint for Facebook Interactions data

Recently published research using CrowdTangle data:

• Facebook Groups and YouTube Enabled Viral Spread of ‘Plandemic’ Misinformation (Erin Gallagher).  Erin used CrowdTangle to pull the data for this piece, and created the network maps using Gephi. Zarine Kharazian from DFRLab created a step-by-step on how to make a similar visualization: Walkthrough: Tracking the spread of the debunked Plandemic video. 
• Facebook shut down commercial disinformation network based in Myanmar and Vietnam (DFRLabs). DFRLabs used Intelligence to demonstrate coordination between fake telecom pages in Myanmar.
• #Dark inspiration - Eudaimonic entertainment in extremist Instagram posts  (University of Munster). This paper used cluster analysis to identify patterns in extremist messaging on Instagram. The cluster analysis code is also linked on the OSF page.
• Internet users engage more with phatic posts than with health misinformation on Facebook (Sciences Po). Published in Nature, this piece analyzes engagement data on health misinformation posts, and finds that misinformation is actually a deterrent to engagement when compared with posts from friends and family.
• Evidence of Russia-Linked Influence Operations in Africa (Stanford Internet Observatory). This analysis included 73 pages across 6 countries in Africa linked to a range of entities connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin, including the Wagner Group.
• Tracking Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in the 2017 and 2018 Italian Elections (University of Urbino). This paper lays out a methodology for identifying and tracking coordinating inauthentic link sharing behavior on Facebook.
• Right-Wingers on the Rise Online -- Insights from the 2018 Swedish Elections (Kristiana University). This paper describes the ways in which right-wing actors across the media and the political sector are more successful in engaging their Facebook followers than their competitors, often utilizing sensational rhetoric and hate-mongering as campaign techniques. 

To access your API token, click the gear in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen from any dashboard. Select “API Access” in the drop-down menu. After you’ve agreed to the Facebook Platform Policies for the API (which you can read by clicking on the link in the pop-up), you’ll be provided with an API token. To request an increase in API rate limit or /posts/search endpoint activation, please fill out this form.