Brandon is an expert on social media data access & transparency and he's collaborating with the Center to help build more long-term infrastructure for the social media research community.
Brandon is building a new organization focused on social media transparency. Previously, Brandon was the CEO & co-founder of CrowdTangle, a a social analytics tool that was acquired by Facebook in 2016, and was one of the main ways Facebook was transparent with the outside world. Through his work with CrowdTangle, Brandon and his team worked with thousands of news outlets, human rights groups, election protection orgs, fact-checkers and more to help monitor and study social media. Data from their work appeared in hunderds of academic journals, as well as thousands of news articles over the years. He was formerly a Knight Policy Fellow at George Washington's Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. He speaks frequently about the role that transparency can play in helping build a better internet, as well as helping educate lawmakers and regulators on how to require more data access in ethical and privacy-protecting ways. He has testified in the US Senate, as well as Australian Parliament, advised the White House and European Commission, and regularly works with a wide ranging group of international NGOs, non-profits and platforms.
