A week before race riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland, entrepreneurial trolls operating from Africa launched a Facebook page called "Patriots of Britain".

They started publishing anti-immigrant misinformation from the moment it was created in late July and boosted its content with fake followers from Vietnam and India, with the probable aim of building an audience that they could then drive to websites featuring ads.

After the fatal stabbing of three young girls in the seaside town of Southport on July 29, false online posts wrongly identifying the suspected killer as an Islamist migrant triggered widespread violence.

It was here that the page's administrators saw an opportunity.

The "Patriots of Britain" page began spreading rumours of "masked gangs hunting down people in Britain" and sharing call-outs for people to attend protests organised by anti-immigrant groups.

On August 2, it posted a picture of a smiling cartoon man with a knife protruding from his chest with the caption "New logo of Southport".

When ABC NEWS Verify flagged the unauthentic behaviour on this page with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, it was quickly taken down.

The short life span of "Patriots of Britain" meant its impact was minimal, but similar pages spreading potentially dangerous falsehoods might soon fall through the cracks.

ABC NEWS Verify was able to detect the page with a Meta-owned product called CrowdTangle. Today, after years of the tool bringing it public humiliation, Facebook will be killing it off for good.

What is CrowdTangle and why is it being closed?

Meta purchased CrowdTangle in 2016 when it was mostly used as a marketing and social media management tool.

The dashboard — effectively a super-charged social media search engine — offered a free and rare way to peek inside Facebook and Instagram and track what was trending and who was responsible. It was information that was not readily available on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter).

Most of Facebook's 3 billion monthly active users have never used it and will not even notice at first when it is gone. However, its imminent closure has sent academics, journalists, and civic groups who rely on it to expose disinformation into a panic.

Reporting from the US suggested Meta had slowly been starving CrowdTangle of resources since 2021 and had planned to deactivate it in 2022, but was forced to keep it operational due to the EU Digital Services Act requiring social media companies to allow researchers access to platform data.

Meta is rolling out a replacement called the Meta Content Library (MCL) but it is restricting access to approved academics and non-profit researchers.

The tech giant has defied high-level calls, including from the US Congress and the European Commission, to keep CrowdTangle alive and will officially deactivate it on August 14.

Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has been pushing big tech for more transparency, lamented the loss of a near real-time social monitoring tool ahead of the US presidential race in November and the next Australian federal election.

"They're referring it to it as the deepfake election, so we may see totally new vectors of harm and spread of mis- and disinformation," the commissioner said.

"If we're killing social media monitoring tools that are giving us just a degree of transparency, then it's going to limit our ability to be able to intercede and stop those harmful activities from undermining democratic processes."

The transparency tool has been a thorn in Meta's side for years.

CrowdTangle's data has repeatedly been used by reporters and academics to illuminate how the top trending content on Facebook is often hyper-political or rife with misinformation.

In 2020, The New York Times relied on the tool to reveal how Plandemic — a conspiracy theory film featuring testimony from a discredited anti-vaccine activist — was one of the top-performing posts throughout COVID-19.

The ABC has relied on CrowdTangle to uncover a coordinated network of African-run Facebook pages attempting to influence the outcome of this year's UK general election. We also used it to show how misinformation and racist conspiracy theories dominated last year's Voice to Parliament referendum.

ABC NEWS Verify understands that some members of the UK government have also used CrowdTangle. When it became clear that incendiary posts were fanning the flames of the race riots, the government contacted the major social media companies.

"I have been clear it is unacceptable that people are using social media to cause damage, distress and destruction in our communities," UK technology secretary Peter Kyle told ABC NEWS Verify.

"I've had useful meetings with TikTok, Meta, Google and X, to make clear their responsibility to continue to work with us to stop the spread of hateful misinformation and incitement.

"There is a significant amount of content circulating that platforms need to be dealing with at pace."

A standard set by the 'Musk effect'

Hundreds of people have been arrested for their involvement in the riots and some offenders have already been handed jail terms.

Although UK police named 17-year-old Cardiff-born Axel Rudakubana as the suspect behind the Southport stabbings, social media posts attacking Muslim migrants have continued to proliferate online.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also been under pressure to launch an inquiry into social media platforms' role in turbo-charging the riots.

Despite pressure from governments worldwide for transparency, the major tech companies are sliding into further obfuscation.

"I call this the Musk effect," said Marc Owen Jones, author and digital disinformation expert from Qatar's Hamad Bin Khalifa University.