The Nuts and Bolts of Social Media Transparency
Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company acquired CrowdTangle, a startup designed to provide insight into what content is performing well on Facebook and Instagram, and he left in October 2021, in the midst of a debate over how much information the company should make public about its platform. As the New York Times described it, CrowdTangle \u201chad increasingly become an irritant\u201d to Facebook\u2019s leadership \u201cas it revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information.\u201d
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brandon about what we mean when we talk about transparency from social media platforms and why that transparency matters. They also discussed his work with the Congress and other regulators to advise on what legislation ensuring more openness from platforms would look like\u2014and why it\u2019s so hard to draft regulation that works.
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