R. Gordon Rinderknecht
In 2016, RAND researchers described Russia's attempts at influencing the American public as a “firehose of falsehood,” characterized by a high volume of content distributed broadly, repetitively, and with little commitment to truth and consistency.
Our knowledge of these tactics was partly built on a degree of social media transparency that no longer exists in 2024.
The social media site X ceased offering free access to researchers in 2023, now charging them $42,000 a month for the access necessary for large-scale research. Reddit also ended free access for large-scale research in 2023.
Meta just replaced CrowdTangle, its platform allowing journalists and researchers to monitor trends on Facebook and Instagram, with a replacement that is reportedly less transparent and less accessible.
And then there's TikTok, generally considered by researchers to be among the most opaque and difficult to work with of major social media platforms. TikTok has not necessarily grown worse in this regard, but its opaqueness has grown more consequential as its popularity has expanded.
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