CrossOver Monitoring

CrossOver Monitoring maps the algorithmic recommender systems of online platforms, search engines and marketplaces. It helps users track how these recommender systems contribute to disinformation and other forms of information manipulation. This data is visualised via easy-to-use dashboards on a dedicated website. CrossOver is currently active in about 15 countries throughout Europe and Africa.

What does it do?

CrossOver emulates non logged-in users browsing several social media platforms and search engines, when searching for specific keywords. Users can be emulated from across different locations in the world (cities, regions, countries), enabling geographical granularity on the data collection. We currently emulate user experiences’ on Tiktok, Youtube, Bluesky, Amazon, Google search and Bing. The overall aim of the project is to understand what type of content they are shown by VLOP’s and VLOSE’s recommender systems.

What does it not do?

The dataset comes from platforms’ websites, not apps, and emulates a user who is not logged in. The dashboard provides a visualization of data that is retrieved through the data collection using Crossover in order for users to analyse them -with the guidance of CheckFirst if needed.

How does it do this?

This is done by using a blend of user-simulation and data via official APIs or programmatic endpoints.

Who is it for?

• Customers interested in understanding how content and information associated with certain hashtags, keywords and emojis is surfaced by platforms.
• Customers interested in understanding how minors may experience the content on certain platforms.
• Customers interested in making comparisons between similar content on different platforms.

History

• 2021-2022: In 2021, CrossOver received funding from the European Union’s Pilot Projects and Preparatory Actions financing programme in the field of ‘Communications Networks, Content and Technology’, under grant agreement LC-01682253. EU DisinfoLab led this project, with the participation of CheckFirst, Apache and Savoir*Devenir.
  Gathering data from various social media platforms, 4 reports were published: Are YouTube Algorithms Addicted to State-Controlled Media? ; Disinformation on Donbas is only a Google autocomplete away ; Why is “Nazis” regularly trending on Twitter in Belgium? ; Are State-Controlled Chinese sources trying to dominate Xinjiang coverage on Google News?.
• 2022-2023: In 2022, CrossOver received the support of the Mozilla Technology Fund to expand into seven new French speaking regions and countries. The pilot project ended in early 2023. Later in 2023, CrossOver Finland was funded by EMIF to enable the monitoring of public discourse during two major electoral events: the Finnish presidential race and the 2024 EU elections.
• 2024: CrossOver-based reports have been delivered in March, in May and in July 2024.
• 2025: While investigating the Pravda network, we used CrossOver to monitor tweets promoting Pravda domain links. We also published the beta of the third version of CrossOver.