A powerful tool to hold Big Tech accountable

By: Riana Bucceri and Jamie Neikrie

Issue One just launched the Big Tech’s Broken Promises tracker – a database that catalogs the history of empty proclamations and covert policy changes by the world’s largest technology companies.  All of the examples included in the tracker were announced publicly, only to be later retracted, significantly altered, marginalized, or never come to fruition. This tool will help shed light on how these platforms operate in practice, rather than in their marketing or lobbying materials. 

The launch of this tracker comes on the heels of another broken promise by a major platform. Yesterday, Meta disabled CrowdTangle, a tool used by academic and civil society researchers to study activity on Instagram and Facebook. Since Meta (then-Facebook) purchased CrowdTangle in 2016, researchers and fact-checkers have used it to study critical user activity on the platform, shedding light on topics such as foreign interference, misinformation, and disinformation. Meta itself has touted CrowdTangle as an empowering tool for researchers, which begs the question of why they would replace the tool with the less functional Content Library in a historic election year.  

Voters representing nearly half of the world’s population head to the polls in at least 64 countries, including the upcoming U.S. presidential election. In previous elections, content that promoted conspiracy theories about our elections, harassment of election officials, and the undermining of trust in key procedures like ballot drop boxes or mail-in voting were spread extensively on Facebook and Instagram. These false narratives helped fuel the turmoil and violence on January 6, 2021, as documented by the House Select Committee that investigated the Capitol insurrection. 

Despite open letters from members of Congress across both sides of the aisle and 181 civil society groups, Meta has ignored these concerns, instead deciding to sunset a crucial social listening tool just three months before the U.S. presidential election. For a company that has promised to protect election information in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, their decision leaves many election officials concerned about how false information will be tracked and mitigated. 

This isn’t the first example of Meta promising one thing and doing another. The company for years has vowed to keep kids safe online, protect user privacy, and combat radicalization, yet Facebook and Instagram remain rife with predators, extremists, and foreign influence actors. 

Many of the promises made by these platforms are half-truths or deflections that hide a different reality. And while these empty promises are not a reflection on the employees of these platforms — who work hard to build safe and healthy systems — they are illustrative of the broader incentives driving not only Meta but the broader Big Tech ecosystem, including Snap, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Google’s YouTube.

Issue One is paying attention to Big Tech’s Broken Promises. Without meaningful federal transparency standards, these companies have chosen to offer only sporadic and incomplete disclosures that keep policymakers and the American public in the dark. In lieu of these tools, our new tracker compiles testimonies, news articles, academic and civil society research, and more to document more than 100 broken promises from Big Tech. This interactive tracker is designed to inform lawmakers, advocates, and researchers as they seek to apply new oversight measures to these companies. Users can filter the tracker to sort by category, date, platform, and type of promise.

We hope this tool will emphasize the repeated failures of some of the world’s largest social media companies and the incentives driving them. Ultimately, however, we hope to underscore the need for meaningful transparency and accountability standards. For the last two decades, Congress has thrown up its hands and said, “we trust you” to Big Tech, despite overwhelming evidence that these companies have never acted in our best interests. We can’t allow these companies to grade their own homework any longer.