Interview with CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks' responsibility to open up, including by doing and sharing their own research
CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks' responsibility to open up — Brandon Silverman knows more about how stories spread on Facebook than almost anyone. Tweets: @marielamensch84 , @frankpasquale , and @_claireconnelly Tweets: Marie Lamensch / @marielamensch84 : “We should be building out more solutions that enable civil society to help be a part of managing the public spaces we've found ourselves in.We should act like we really believe an open internet is better than a closed one,” CrowdTangle CEO @CaseyNewton https://www.platformer.news/ ... Frank Pasquale / @frankpasquale : A bipartisan group of senators are working “on legislation that would legally require Meta and other platform companies to disclose the kind of information you can still find on CrowdTangle today, along with much more.” https://www.platformer.news/ ... Claire Connelly / @_claireconnelly : “We've seen some platforms become really critical public forums for discussing the war, but they are making almost no effort to support civil society in making sense of what's happening.” https://www.platformer.news/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Silverman's argument lands at a hinge moment in his own company's story. He had already left Meta to help draft [[a:974554|a bipartisan transparency bill aimed at forcing platforms to disclose what CrowdTangle shows]], and the interview makes the case for why such mandates are needed: networks hold the best data on how stories spread but share it selectively, as when News Feed insiders bristled at Kevin Roose tweeting CrowdTangle's top-engagement Facebook stories.
The tension is structural rather than personal. Facebook had already conceded that a long-running error silently hid thousands of Jan. 6-related posts from CrowdTangle, and within months Meta would begin an internal process to shut the tool down — only to pause it as the EU's Digital Services Act gained traction, turning the very transparency instrument Silverman built into a question of regulatory obligation.
First-order effects
- Researchers and civil-society groups whose scrutiny of Facebook runs through CrowdTangle face an access regime controlled entirely by Meta, which has shown it can pause, degrade, or wind down that access on its own timeline.
- The bipartisan senators drafting disclosure legislation gain a credible industry insider making their case publicly, sharpening pressure on Meta ahead of the Senate hearing where Silverman testified alongside other researchers.
Second-order effects
- Meta's plan to retire CrowdTangle collides with the DSA's momentum: what looked like an internal cleanup becomes a compliance liability, since regulators increasingly expect the kind of data access the tool provides.
- Rival platforms watch the same legislative push, knowing any disclosure mandate modeled on CrowdTangle-style data would set the bar they too would have to meet.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform data access shifts from a discretionary API courtesy to regulated infrastructure, with independent researchers holding legally backed rights to audit how content spreads.
- That reframes transparency as a governance function: the fight over one tool's fate becomes a test of whether public-interest oversight of social networks is negotiated with each platform or guaranteed by statute.
The trend: Social network data access is moving from voluntary, revocable goodwill toward legally mandated transparency, with CrowdTangle's fate as the early battleground.