Ex-FB exec pushes to open social media’s ‘black boxes’
Brandon Silverman’s last day at Facebook was Oct 8, and like many others who have sold their companies to a Silicon Valley giant, had their shares vest and departed, he planned to take a year off to spend time with his children and figure out what to do next.
He had been at the social media giant since it acquired his startup, CrowdTangle, in 2016. And he had watched that project, which tracks the content that draws attention on Facebook, emerge as perhaps the single most important window into what was actually happening on the megaplatform. But his project had increasingly become an irritant to his bosses, as it revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information.
While Mr Silverman no longer works at Facebook, he hasn’t quite left the company behind. Instead, he has spent the weeks since his exit working with a bipartisan group of US senators on legislation that would, among other things, force the giant social media platforms to provide the sort of transparency that got him marginalised at Facebook.
“What’s happening right now, though, is that a few private companies are disseminating a massive amount of the world’s news and it’s largely happening inside black boxes,” Mr Silverman told me last week, in his first interview since leaving the company. “I think figuring out ways to both help and, in some cases, force, large platforms to be more transparent with news and civic content as it’s in the process of being disseminated can ultimately help make social platforms better homes for
public discourse — and in a lot of ways, help them live up to a lot of their original promise.”
Much of what Americans know about what happens inside companies like Google and Facebook these days comes from employees who tire of the corporate spin and leak internal documents. Congress is responding to documents leaked first to The Wall Street Jour
nal by a former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen. The revelations in those documents confirmed and deepened the perception of an out-of-control information wasteland hinted at by CrowdTangle’s data.
Mr Silverman isn’t a leaker or a whistleblower, and he declined to discuss details of his time at Facebook. But his defection from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill is significant. He arrived with detailed knowledge of perhaps the most effective transparency tool in the history of social media, and he has helped write it into a piece of legislation that is notable for its technical savvy.
Nathaniel Persily, the James B McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford University, who first suggested a version of the transparency legislation in October, said Mr Silverman had been “instrumental” in shaping the section of the legislation that would authorise the Federal Trade Commission to force platforms to disclose, in real time, what information is spreading on them. The provision is part of a bill more broadly aimed at letting academic researchers conduct independent studies into the inner workings of the platforms and their social effects. As written, the legislation would apply to Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Snap — and probably extend to Amazon.
Washington is awash in proposals for reforming social media, but in a narrowly divided Congress, it’s little surprise that none have passed. Many Democrats believe that social media’s core problem is that dangerous far-right speech is being amplified. Many Republicans believe that the core problem is that the platforms are suppressing conservative political views. The new Senate legislation, which was introduced by two Democrats, Chris Coons and Amy Klobuchar, and a Republican, Rob Portman, may have a path toward passage because it doesn’t require taking a side in that argument.
“It’s not taking a position on some of the big divisive issues on social media and tech and regulation,” Mr Coons said, but simply providing “more critically needed data and research”.
For Mr Silverman, the legislation is a return to politics. He came to the tech industry via an unusual path, which began in 2005 at the Center for Progressive Leadership, a nonprofit organisation aimed at training a new generation of political leaders. He became interested in building online communities to keep the programme’s alumni connected. In 2011, he helped found a firm then called OpenPage Labs, aimed at building social networks for progressive nonprofits using Facebook’s “open graph”, a short-lived program that allowed software developers to integrate their apps with Facebook.
The most successful element of that company was its ability to measure what was happening on Facebook pages and groups, and the company began licensing its analytical tools to publishers, among others. A significant customer was the fast-growing progressive media startup Upworthy in 2013, followed by a wave of other media companies. I first met Mr Silverman in that period, and it was clear that his company’s insight into which stories were spreading fastest on Facebook offered a distinct advantage to writers and editors looking for traffic.
But as the news about Facebook’s impact on society turned negative, CrowdTangle was increasingly seen internally as a threat. In July 2020, my colleague Kevin Roose started a Twitter account listing Facebook’s most engaged links every day. The account was an irritant to Facebook’s executives, “embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists”, as Mr Roose put it after he obtained internal emails debating the future of CrowdTangle in July.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, complained in the emails that “our own tools are helping journos to consolidate the wrong narrative”.
Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president who was Mr Silverman’s boss before resigning in 2020, told Mr Roose that the CrowdTangle data he used “told a story they didn’t like and frankly didn’t want to admit was true”. The company subsequently disbanded Mr Silverman’s team, leaving Crowd-Tangle’s future in doubt.
About three weeks after Mr Silverman left Facebook, Mr Persily contacted him to say that Mr Coons’ office was interested in his help with the tech legislation. The legislation is being circulated in draft form for feedback from, among others, the tech firms themselves. Tucker Bounds, a spokesperson for Meta — Facebook’s parent — pointed to CrowdTangle’s technical limits and said that “a more rounded approach to transparency requires new tools”. (The company’s earlier attempts to displace CrowdTangle data with its own reporting foundered when the data proved unflattering, was suppressed and then leaked to my colleagues Davey Alba and Ryan Mac.) Still, CrowdTangle has made Facebook more transparent to outsiders than YouTube, TikTok or Snap. Bounds also said that Facebook was “the only major consumer platform to provide this level of transparency”, adding, “We plan to keep providing industry-leading transparency into how our products work and urge our competitors to do the same.”
The Senate aide said the tech companies had only been heatedly opposed to one element: a tough enforcement mechanism that would suspend legal protections under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for companies that don’t comply with demands that they make their inner workings available to researchers and the public. The aide said the legislation would be formally introduced early this year.
And if the legislation passes, Facebook may live to regret the energy it spent working to shut Mr Silverman’s window into the platform. But I suspect many of us will be grateful to rest the high-stakes debate about social media on shared facts, available in real time.