At Wednesday's Senate hearing, CrowdTangle's Brandon Silverman and other researchers explained why the US needs laws requiring Big Tech companies to share data
Everyone wants answers about social networks. These experts know where to look — On Wednesday, Congress was treated …
PlatformerCasey Newton
Context & Ripple Effects
Brandon Silverman has been building toward this hearing for months: after leaving Meta, the Facebook-acquired CrowdTangle co-founder helped draft a bipartisan social media transparency bill, and in a March interview he argued platforms have a responsibility to open up their data and even run their own research. Wednesday's session put that argument directly before lawmakers.
The testimony also lands against a familiar backdrop — earlier Senate hearings on algorithms and Section 230 reform showed Congress inching toward substance rather than sound bites, while a later committee appearance saw Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter executives defend their platforms and dodge security, privacy, and moderation questions. Silverman's pitch is the counter-model: stop relying on what platforms volunteer, and legislate access.
First-order effects
Silverman and allied researchers now have a direct legislative audience for turning CrowdTangle-style research access into a legal requirement, shifting the debate from voluntary platform tools to mandated data sharing.
Big Tech platforms face the prospect of compulsory researcher access to internal data — a compliance obligation they currently control through discretionary tools like CrowdTangle itself.
Second-order effects
If a data-sharing mandate advances, platforms will push back on scope and security grounds while competitors and startups could gain a cheaper path to auditing incumbents' networks, since mandated access lowers the cost of independent scrutiny.
Advertisers, regulators, and civil-society researchers become secondary customers of any mandated data pipeline, pressuring platforms to build disclosure infrastructure they would not build voluntarily.
Third-order effects
The pattern points toward researcher data access becoming standing regulatory infrastructure in the US — analogous to how financial disclosures are audited — rather than a perk platforms grant or revoke at will.
Whether the Clarity Act-style bills stall or pass will determine whether transparency becomes a statutory duty enforced by regulators or remains a patchwork of platform goodwill and one-off hearings.
The trend: Platform transparency is migrating from voluntary, company-controlled tools toward legislated data-access mandates, with former insiders like Silverman acting as the bridge between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill.
📣A Senate Judiciary subcommittee will hold a hearing at 2pm today on platform transparency/understanding the impact of social media. The conversation about social media data access should start with what questions we want to answer with those data.🧵1/ https://www.judiciary.senate…
@brandonsilverm : in 2020, The NY Times called us the most effective social media transparency tool in existence. A few months later, Facebook paused work on the product and disbanded the team. God, that statement is shocking.
“On Wednesday, Congress was treated to the unfamiliar spectacle of highly intelligent people talking with nuance about platform regulation.” Great coverage of today's transparency hearing by @CaseyNewton https://www.platformer.news/ ...
24/ @amyklobuchar : This hearing is also about how quickly misinformation and disinformation can spread online. A recent report identified a dozen content producers that were responsible for 65% of COVID disinformation online. That speech is also protected, but Amy doesn't care.
Social media platforms have connected the world, but too often, we're in the dark about how they impact us. Tune in now to my Senate Judiciary hearing on the need to increase transparency around social media companies' data: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/ ...
Passing @persily's @StanfordCyber Platform Accountability Act is the essential next step to address disinfo. Without visibility into what platforms are doing, getting the interventions right is impossible. Years of work have gone into this w @SocSciOne @SSRC_mtp @Hewlett_Found ht…
Predicable from the moment Facebook acquired Crowdtangle. If you don't want Facebook to shut you down, and you think your company serves the public good, it's simple: don't sell to Facebook. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I wrote about today's very good Senate hearing on why we need laws to require Big Tech to share data. Featuring CrowdTangle's @brandonsilverm on how the whole industry has decided to share as little as possible, for fear of embarrassment https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://t…
Two of best answers I've heard from Senate hearing on social media. This is @persily, professor at Stanford Law, co-founder of Social Science One, an effort to study Facebook. When witnesses say “platforms” or “social media companies,” you can mostly substitute in “Facebook.” /1 …
Here is @brandonsilverm, ceo of CrowdTangle before and after Facebook ownership. He drank some of the loop aid and had an inside view. I respect the candor. /2 https://twitter.com/...
If you read one written testimony submission, I would read Professor of Ethical Leadership and social psychologist at NYU, @JonHaidt (alongside his Atlantic piece last month). Includes a lot of “wow” insights. /3 https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/ ...
This. In a time when I need to think doing good work matters, I'm so relieved to see @persily and @daphnehk giving sage counsel for creating useful better laws. https://twitter.com/...