MANILA, Philippines – Content discovery and social monitoring platform CrowdTangle announced on Saturday, December 7, that it is giving fact checkers access to a new search tool, which can find and measure public posts across several social media platforms.

“CrowdTangle is increasing its focus on misinformation and the part we can play in helping prevent it. Our goal is to make it fast and easy to research public content,” the company said.

This tool can search for public posts shared across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. It is still in beta and is only currently available to Facebook’s fact-checking partners.

To use the tool, users only need to plug in a keyword, hashtag, or URL, and the CrowdTangle database will show all posts associated with the search.

The search can be filtered by platform, post type, country, timeframe, or account type. It can also be sorted by the most overperforming, total number interactions, newest or oldest, most followers, or interaction rate.

CrowdTangle automatically adds Facebook pages with more than 100,000 likes, public Instagram accounts with over 75,000 followers, and all verified accounts to its database.

However, CrowdTangle is not able to track any private content. Accounts, pages, groups, or other channels that have privacy settings enabled cannot be added to the database.

Rappler regularly uses CrowdTangle in its fact-checking process to assess viral posts and see which channels amplify dubious posts. To know more about Rappler’s fact-checking methodology, go here. – Rappler.com