“A Former Facebook Executive Pushes to Open Social Media’s ‘Black Boxes’”

Ben Smith NYT column:

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 Journal 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 whistle-blower, 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 authorize 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 would probably, a Senate aide said, also extend to Amazon.

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