[ad_1]
“Every new revelation about the problematic activities of social media companies rekindles calls for congressional action,” Senator Portman said in an emailed statement. Before answering those calls, he said, “Congress needs to take a step back to make sure we don’t legislate in the dark.”
Return to legislative politics for Mr. Silverman. He came to the tech industry in an unconventional way, starting in 2005 at the Center for Progressive Leadership, a nonprofit that aims to train the next generation of political leaders. He became interested in creating online communities as a way to keep the program’s graduates connected. In 2011, he helped found a company called OpenPage Labs, which aims to create social networks for progressive nonprofits using Facebook’s “open graph,” a short-lived program that allows software developers to integrate their applications with Facebook.
The most successful element of this company was its ability to measure what was happening on its Facebook pages and groups, and the company began licensing its analytics tools to publishers, among others. A key client was Upworthy, the fast-growing progressive media company in 2013, and a wave of other media companies followed. It was around that time that I first met Mr. Silverman, and it was clear that his company’s insights into what news was spreading the fastest on Facebook gave it a distinct advantage for writers and editors looking for traffic.
In 2017, Facebook made the service free and opened it up to thousands of new users. Eventually, human rights organizations and fact-checkers who wanted to understand their own communities and improve their media, and journalists who wanted to understand Facebook itself, started using it.
“It was then that we began to realize how eager the outside world was and depended on seeing what was happening on the platform,” said Mr. Silverman.
But as news about Facebook’s impact on society turned negative, CrowdTangle was increasingly seen as a threat internally. In July 2020 my colleague Kevin Roose started A Twitter account that lists Facebook’s top links every day, many with provocative right-wing comments. The account was troubling to Facebook’s executives, “ashamed of the difference between what Facebook thought it was – a clean, well-lit public square where kindness and tolerance reigned – and the image they saw reflected in their Twitter listings”. Roose then laid Received internal emails discussing the future of CrowdTangle last July.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, complained in emails that “our own tools are helping journalists reinforce the false narrative”.
[ad_2]
Source link