Transparency, Trade-offs, and Free Speech with Brandon Silverman

We live in a world where platforms influence the digital and real lives of billions of people across the world, perhaps with more influence than many governments. However, the decision making processes around the platform are generally opaque and obscure. 

This is why today’s guest — Integrity Institute Fellow Brandon Silverman — transitioned to policy advocacy for platform transparency, data sharing, and an open internet helping regulators, lawmakers and advocacy groups think through the best ways to set-up online transparency regimes.

Brandon is the former CEO and co-founder of Crowdtangle. a social analytics tool that is used by tens of thousands of newsrooms, academics, researchers, fact-checkers, civil society and more to help monitor public content in real-time.

Some questions we answer on today’s episode:

What tradeoffs exist between free speech and transparency?

How did Crowdtangle partner with civic actors across the world?

Brandon’s thoughts on the leaking of the Twitter Algorithm

What principle Crowdtangle used when sharing access to governments?

What metric did the Crowdtangle team optimize for?

What Brandon wished he could have done differently at Meta?

And of course how you the listener can help in this fight for platform transparency.

Links:

The United States’ Approach to 'Platform' Regulation by Eric Goldman

State Abuse of Transparency Laws and How to Stop It by Daphne Keller

The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability by Solomon Messing

Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick

As a reminder, the views stated in this episode are not affiliated with any organization and only represent the views of the individuals. We hope you enjoy the show.