Junkipedia
Cross-platform social media monitoring for journalists and researchers. Tracks 14 platforms including fringe networks that most tools ignore.
What should journalists know about Junkipedia?
CrowdTangle died in August 2024. Meta replaced it with the Meta Content Library, restricted to credentialed academics. That left journalists without a cross-platform social media monitoring tool. Junkipedia fills part of that gap — and goes further by covering platforms CrowdTangle never touched. It monitors 14 platforms: Bitchute, Facebook, Gab, GETTR, Instagram, OK.ru, Parler, Rumble, Telegram, TikTok, Truth Social, Twitter/X, VK, and YouTube. It also monitors podcasts and Substack. The killer feature is automatic transcription — Junkipedia transcribes audio from TikTok videos, YouTube videos, and podcasts, then makes those transcripts searchable by keyword. That means you can find what someone said on a podcast without listening to every episode. Built by Cameron Hickey, an Emmy-winning former PBS NewsHour journalist who founded the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), a Congressionally-chartered nonprofit. Hickey previously led Harvard's Information Disorder Lab at the Shorenstein Center. The platform is collaborative: organizations can share monitored content with each other to reduce duplication and spot cross-platform narrative trends. The tradeoff is depth. Junkipedia does not have CrowdTangle's comprehensive Facebook dataset — it tracks accounts you specify, not every public page. The interface has been described as clunky compared to commercial social listening tools. And some platform coverage depends on API availability, which means access can break when platforms change their terms. For the price (free), the cross-platform breadth and transcript search are unmatched.
Tracking narratives across mainstream and fringe platforms simultaneously. Monitoring accounts on platforms like Gab, GETTR, Truth Social, and Rumble that commercial tools ignore. Searching podcast and video transcripts by keyword without manual listening. Collaborative disinformation investigations where multiple organizations share findings. Post-CrowdTangle social media monitoring on a zero budget.
Comprehensive Facebook or Instagram analytics — Junkipedia tracks specific accounts, not the full public dataset CrowdTangle offered. Real-time brand monitoring or PR use cases — it is built for civic and investigative research, not marketing. Sentiment analysis or automated trend detection — the platform requires manual narrative tagging. Users who need polished dashboards or one-click reporting — the interface is functional but not slick.
Security & Privacy
Data is scrambled while being sent to their servers
Data is scrambled when stored on their servers
Where servers are located — affects which governments can request your data
Privacy policy summary
Junkipedia collects standard account information for approved users. The platform aggregates publicly available social media content — it does not access private messages or non-public posts. Reasonable security measures in place per their policy, but no specifics on encryption at rest or data retention periods. Users must respect intellectual property and platform terms of service when using collected data. No advertising, no data sales — the tool is grant-funded.
How to protect yourself:
Junkipedia collects public posts, not private data — but your monitoring lists reveal what you are investigating. If you are tracking accounts tied to hostile actors, assume your list of monitored accounts is sensitive information. Use a dedicated research account rather than a personal one. Export data regularly — grant-funded tools can lose funding or shut down without warning. Verify any content you find through Junkipedia against the original platform before publishing, since aggregation can miss context like edits, deletions, or community notes. The automatic transcription is useful but imperfect — always check quotes against source audio before attribution.
Junkipedia aggregates publicly available social media content — it does not handle end-to-end encrypted messages or sensitive source communications. The primary security consideration is that your monitoring lists reveal your investigative interests, and the platform stores that data on U.S.-based infrastructure operated by a nonprofit. HTTPS in transit is confirmed. Encryption at rest and detailed infrastructure security are not publicly documented. NCoC is a Congressionally-chartered nonprofit with 80 years of history and institutional funders (Gates, Rockefeller, Ford), which provides organizational stability but also means the platform operates in a U.S. government-adjacent context — relevant for journalists investigating U.S. government actors. Not open source, so no independent code audit exists. No reported data breaches or security incidents. For its intended use case — monitoring public social media posts for investigative research — the risk profile is low. Do not use it for anything requiring source protection or operational security.
Who Owns This
Known issues
Not open source — the Junkipedia platform code is proprietary. ATI's GitHub has 9 public repos (including a social media collector extension and Candidata), but the core Junkipedia application is not among them. Platform coverage depends on API access and scraping methods that can break when platforms change terms — Parler shut down entirely in 2023, and Twitter/X API access has become increasingly restricted and expensive since Elon Musk's acquisition. The interface has been described as clunky by researchers accustomed to commercial tools. Narrative tagging and categorization require manual effort — there is no automated classification. Automatic transcription is English-only. Grant-funded sustainability is inherently fragile — if NCoC loses funding, the tool could disappear like CrowdTangle did. The platform was originally designed for U.S.-focused disinformation research, so coverage of non-English-language content and non-U.S. platforms (OK.ru, VK) may be less developed. Application-based access means you cannot try it immediately — approval process timeline is unclear.
Pricing
Free. Application required — approved users get full access at no cost.
This is an editorial assessment based on publicly available information as of 2026-04-03, using our published methodology. Independent security review is pending. Security posture can change at any time. This is not a guarantee of safety.
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