Arbiter targets CrowdTangle gap

TLDR

• Arbiter, from nonprofit SimPPL, uses AI to track narratives across eight to nine platforms; DW, Chequeado and Rappler are onboard.¹⁴⁵
• Users from more than 100 organisations have registered, and newsrooms trialling it pay nothing for now.¹
• Evidence of its value so far is one early user's account and SimPPL's own descriptions.¹³

Arbiter, a tool from the nonprofit SimPPL, is trying to replace the narrative tracking journalists lost when Meta shut CrowdTangle in 2024, Nieman Lab reports.¹

Why it matters: investigators who relied on CrowdTangle to see how content spread across Facebook and Instagram now have a candidate that covers more platforms, though it is unproven.¹

Driving the news:

• Nieman Lab says Arbiter pulls posts from social media APIs, academic data dumps and third-party scraping companies, and covers Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Bluesky and 4chan.¹
• A plain-language prompt makes it label and cluster posts by narrative, extract claims, find accounts pushing the same message across platforms and write a summary report.¹
• Its trend-line feature maps when a narrative emerges and peaks on each platform, which SimPPL president Swapneel Mehta says sets it apart from PR-oriented social listening tools.¹
• Its first newsrooms include Deutsche Welle, Chequeado and Rappler.¹
• Nest Center co-founder Duuya Baatar says Meta Content Library is "nowhere near CrowdTangle" for analysing how the information ecosystem is changing.¹
• Baatar says Arbiter flagged small accounts predicting a libel and defamation focus in Mongolia's replacement criminal code; weeks later parliament announced a working group on exactly that.¹

By the numbers:

• More than 100 organisations have registered users.¹
• Arbiter uses eight to 10 different AI models in its stack.¹

The big picture: SimPPL describes Arbiter as a public observatory for digital narratives, built with "platform-approved data" and local partners.³ Nieman Lab says all trialling newsrooms use it free and SimPPL is still exploring revenue beyond newsroom subscriptions.¹

Single-source note: everything here rests on one Nieman Lab report, republished by GIJN on 21 September and therefore not independent, plus SimPPL's own site. No independent test of Arbiter's accuracy has been found, and Nest Center's early-warning example is anecdotal. The sources also do not say what the tool will cost after the free trial.¹²³

Update, 22 October 2026: Two sources that do not draw on Nieman Lab describe Arbiter's reach differently from the eight platforms listed above. The Brown Institute's announcement of its 2026-2027 Magic Grants says Arbiter covers nine major platforms, naming X, TikTok, Reddit and Telegram, and says every output includes its full reasoning and source posts as an evidence chain.⁴ It describes a planned pilot with local newsrooms covering the US midterms.⁴ Wikimedia Enterprise, in a June case study, says SimPPL indexes posts across nine social media platforms and that Arbiter checks extracted claims against Wikipedia articles.⁵ SimPPL said on LinkedIn on 9 October that it was rolling out daily narrative monitoring in Arbiter to trusted partners, with wider access planned the following week.⁶ All three describe the project as SimPPL or its partners present it, so none tests accuracy, coverage or pricing, and the platform count differs between sources.