Brandon was one of the many people who sold their companies to a Silicon Valley giant and had their shares vest, so he was going to take a year off to figure out what to do next.
He was at the social media giant since it acquired his start-up. The project that tracks the content that draws attention on Facebook is perhaps the most important window into what was actually happening on the mega platform. His project revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with right-wing politics and misleading health information, which was an irritant to his bosses.
Mr. Silverman still works at Facebook, even though he no longer works there. He has been working with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators on legislation that would force the giant social media platforms to provide the sort of transparency that got him marginalized at Facebook.
In his first interview since leaving the company, Mr. Silverman told me that a few private companies are spreading a lot of the world's news inside black boxes. I think that figuring out ways to both help and force large platforms to be more transparent with news and civic content as it is being disseminated can ultimately help make social platforms better homes for public discourse.
Employees who leak internal documents and tire of the corporate spin are what Americans know about what goes on inside companies like Facebook. The Wall Street Journal obtained documents from a former Facebook product manager. The documents confirmed the perception of an out-of-control information wasteland.
Mr. Silverman is not a leaker or whistle-blower, and he did not want to discuss his time at Facebook. His defection from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill is significant. He arrived with a lot of knowledge of the most effective transparency tool in the history of social media, and he helped write it into a piece of legislation that is notable for its technical savvy.
The transparency legislation was first suggested by Nathaniel Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. The provision is part of a bill that would allow academic researchers to conduct independent studies into the inner workings of the platforms. A Senate aide said that the legislation would probably apply to Amazon as well.
Washington has a lot of proposals for social media reform, but none have passed in Congress. Many Democrats believe that the main problem with social media is that far-right speech is being amplified. The platforms are suppressing conservative political views according to many Republicans. 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.
Senator Coons said in an interview that it wasn't taking a position on some of the big divisive issues on social media and tech and regulation.
Every new disclosure of problematic activities by social media companies reignites calls for congressional action according to Senator Portman. He said that Congress should take a step back to make sure that they don't legislating in the dark.
The legislation is a return to politics for Mr. Silverman. He came to the tech industry through an unusual path, which began in 2005 at the Center for Progressive Leadership, a nonprofit organization aimed at training a new generation of political leaders. He wanted to keep the program's alumni connected by building online communities. He helped found a company called OpenPage Labs that was meant to build social networks for nonprofits using Facebook's "open graph" program.
The company's ability to measure what was happening on Facebook pages and groups was its most successful element, and the company began licensing its analytical tools to publishers. A wave of other media companies followed by a fast-growing progressive media start-up was a significant customer. 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.
The service was made free by Facebook in 2017. Human rights organizations and fact checkers began using it to understand their societies and improve their media, as well as journalists who wanted to understand Facebook.
The outside world was eager and depended on seeing what was happening on the platform.
CrowdTangle was seen as a threat as the news about Facebook's impact on society turned negative. In July 2020, my colleague Kevin Roose started a Twitter account listing the most engaged links on Facebook, much of it inflammatory right-wing commentary. The account was an irritant to the executives at Facebook because of the disparity between what they thought Facebook was and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.
The vice president for global affairs at Facebook complained in the emails that their own tools were helping the journalists consolidate the wrong narrative.
Brian Boland told Mr. Roose that the CrowdTangle data he used was a lie. CrowdTangle's future is in doubt after the company dissolved Mr. Silverman's team.
Mr. Silverman said he made a small fortune, but he had mixed feelings about his experience at Facebook.
He said that they were given a lot of freedom and resources to do the work for four years. It is notable that one of the reasons you have read so much about Facebook is that it is easy to see into.
He said that the internal politics had turned against CrowdTangle.
He said that there was a vision about transparency that he believed in and his team had come to believe that it was clear that they wouldn't be able to pursue inside Facebook as much as they had in the past.
After Mr. Silverman left Facebook, Mr. Persily contacted him to say that Senator Coons was interested in his help with the tech legislation.
The bill was driven by the frustration of researchers at how hard it is to define the problems posed by social platforms.
Laura Edelson, a PhD candidate in computer science at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering who studies misinformation on Facebook, thought she would confirm liberal concerns that right-wing content gets more engagement and promotion. She said that she found a very high false positive rate for content being flagged, so conservatives probably are experiencing content being taken down incorrectly, while it's also true that right-wing misinformation goes viral on Facebook. Her project ended when Facebook disabled her account. She said the new legislation would be a game-changer.
Mr. Silverman was frustrated to see proposals for fixing social media that were based on anecdotal evidence or folklore. He said a better window into the platforms might help observers untangle cause from effect across a global platform, and understand where Facebook is causing common problems and where it is making parochial ones. The list of right-wing stories Mr. Roose has created is distinctly American. Similar lists in other countries usually turn up cute animals.
The tech companies themselves are receiving feedback on the legislation. Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Meta, pointed to CrowdTangle's technical limits and said that a more rounded approach to transparency requires new tools. When the data proved unflattering, the company suppressed it and then leaked it to my colleagues. CrowdTangle has made Facebook more transparent to outsiders. Mr. Bounds said that Facebook was the only major consumer platform to provide this level of transparency, and that they plan to keep providing industry-leading transparency into how their products work.
The tech companies were opposed to the 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 legislation will be introduced early this year, according to the aide.
If the legislation passes, Facebook may regret the amount of time it spent trying to shut Mr. Silverman's window into the platform. I think many of us will be grateful to have a break from the high-stakes debate about social media on shared facts.
