Anchor Change with Katie Harbath

Share this post

A Comparative Look at Tech Company Election Announcements

anchorchange.substack.com

Discover more from Anchor Change with Katie Harbath

Reporting and analysis of what's happening around the world at the intersection of democracy and technology.
Over 5,000 subscribers
Continue reading
Sign in

A Comparative Look at Tech Company Election Announcements

Tis the season for the platforms to tell us what they’ll be doing for the midterms - so I made a chart

Katie Harbath
Sep 2, 2022
3
Share this post

A Comparative Look at Tech Company Election Announcements

anchorchange.substack.com
Share

Can you believe it’s September already? Where did the summer go? For this last newsletter before the Fall deluge hits us, I want to take a look at the various announcements the tech companies have made about their midterm election plans. I also want to talk about some recommendations we released last week at the Bipartisan Policy Center about how tech companies and election officials can work together to protect the integrity of elections online.  

First, a look at the company announcements. Over the last couple of weeks Twitter, Meta, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Salesforce, and even Parler have put out blog posts detailing their work around the midterms. (Well, Parler didn’t really put out much detail other than they won’t be taking anything down.) I was curious to compare what each company chose to focus on and so, of course, I made a graph.

UPDATE: Turns out LinkedIn had done a post on August 25th about some of their efforts in this space that I had totally missed. You can read it here. Graph is also updated.

Thanks for reading Anchor Change! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

One really quick caveat before I jump in. This is just looking at what the companies focused on in their announcements. It is not comprehensive of everything they are doing. So don’t look at this as a report card or anything - it’s just a look at what each wanted to or didn’t want to highlight. Also, Parler is not represented in the chart mainly because I found the link to their announcement this morning and I had already sent the grid to the BPC digital team to be posted.

The things that stand out to me are:

  • Meta’s the only one who gives a number to how many teams and how much money they’ve spent on safety and security.

  • Only Twitter gives numbers about the effectiveness of their labels.

  • Only Google and Meta specifically call out their work on fighting foreign interference (though I know the other platforms do it too)

  • TikTok, Twitter and YouTube address how they recommend political content; however, Facebook is still not recommending political content in groups according to a recent interview by Tom Alison they just didn’t highlight it.

  • Only YouTube briefly mentioned how they are working with political content creators to use features such as shorts. TikTok mentioned doing briefings for creators about their policies around political paid influencer content, but not about best practices. Twitter talked about how they label candidate accounts, but nothing about helping them to use various features like we very much saw in the past. Crickets from the rest of them even though those teams still very much exist and they have content elsewhere on their sites (Meta) for candidates.

  • Helping candidates and others protect their accounts is a popular talking point for almost all companies as is helping people to find authoritative information about where, when, and how to vote.

  • Only Google didn’t talk about how they are putting out information in languages other than English.

  • All of the platforms other than Salesforce also talked about their election content policies.

  • Nothing yet about any election war rooms though I imagine that will be the type of announcement they talk about come October.

  • Finally, all other than Salesforce and YouTube talked about their policies around political and issue ads.

The companies are clearly trying to play up the work that they think will be the least controversial and downplay that which could draw ire from all sorts of people and groups. Not every platform is the same, so I’m not saying everyone should be doing the same things, but it does make it confusing to know exactly what each platform is or isn’t doing. Can also be worth asking these companies what - if anything - they are doing if they didn’t talk about it. For instance, I know why TikTok doesn’t want to talk about combating foreign interference but seems like something they should have an answer on.

This takes me to the recommendations we put out last week. You can read it in more depth at the link but these came out of a threat ideation exercise we did in July with tech companies and election officials. It was a fantastic way to brainstorm various ways that things could go sideways in the weeks leading up to and after the election. It was also a great opportunity for members of these two communities to meet and learn more about the challenges each faces in doing this work. At a high level here were the recommendations:

  1. Recognize that future cycles will look different

  2. Engage early

  3. Prepare responses before they are needed

  4. Know the difference between bad actors’ intentional spreading of false information and news stories that need corrections

  5. Be sure to confirm the credibility of threats as well as the threats’ source

  6. Remember that it is not possible to address every piece of MDM (Mis/Dis/Malinformation)

  7. Work with community groups to boost authoritative information

  8. Create working relationships between tech companies, election officials, federal officials, and civil society groups

  9. Election officials and tech companies should rely on CISA resources

  10. Command centers operated by federal representatives, IT workers, and election officials can work continuously to mitigate harm to cybersecurity

  11. Policies should be transparently communicated

  12. Collaborating with election officials to design great products

  13. Adopt an “always on” approach

Our hope is that these can be taken into account not just for the midterms, but for 2024 planning which, frankly, should already be happening.

I hope everyone has a lovely Labor Day weekend. I hope to get out for a hike at Scott’s Run tomorrow morning but otherwise working on more organizing projects at home and the analysis of the database of links about tech company announcements on elections that now goes all the way back to 1996!

What I’m Reading

  • The Information: Tech Firms Race to Hire Policy Leaders, Triggering Ripple Effects Across Washington

  • Bloomberg: Russia's Conspiracy-Theory Factory Is Swaying a Brand-New Audience 

  • Guardian: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns as a form of control 

  • New Yorker: Can Pickleball Save America? 

  • World Unpacked: On the Frontlines Fighting Disinformation

  • Washington Post: Republicans are increasingly sharing misinformation, research finds 

  • Axios: Scoop: Truth Social's Google Play Store holdup 

  • The Verge: How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z 

  • ProPublica: Real Money, Fake Musicians: Inside a Million-Dollar Instagram Verification Scheme 

  • Big Technology Podcast: YouTube's Uneasy World Domination — With Mark Bergen

  • Know Your Meme: Where Do Memes Come From? The Top Platforms From 2010-2022 

  • Axios: Robotext onslaught: Americans are suing campaigns for the incessant texts 

  • The Verge: Meta plans to bring paid features to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

  • Economist: How has open-source intelligence influenced the war in Ukraine?

  • New York Times: Farewell, Typos! Twitter Unveils an Edit Button. 

Think Tanks/Academia/Other

  • Center for Growth and Opportunity: CGO Tech Poll 

  • New America: Misleading Information and the Midterms 

  • Michael J. Nelson: How to Read Journal Articles Like a Professor

  • Content Policy and Society Lab: Content Governance In The Metaverse

  • Journal of Online Trust and Safety: Special Issue on Uncommon Yet Consequential Online Harms

  • Integrity Institute: Middleware and the Customization of Content Moderation

  • Brazilian Report: How Lula tries to enter the social media game 

  • Psychology Today: What Makes People Share Misinformation on Social Media? 

  • People vs Big Tech: A 10-point plan to address our information crisis

Companies

  • Google: New trend: Gen Z are loving long-form videos 

  • Google: Our ongoing work to support the 2022 U.S. midterm elections 

  • YouTube: The 2022 U.S. midterm elections on YouTube 

  • Cloudflare: Cloudflare's abuse policies & approach 

  • Twitter: This is a test of Twitter’s new Edit Tweet feature. This is only a test 

  • Twitter: Italian Election Partnership

  • Parler: Parler Announces Midterm Election Content Policy to Guarantee Free Speech 

Jobs

  • International Republican Institute - Program Associate - Technology & Democracy

  • Integrity Institute: Community Organizer, Partnerships and Operations Coordinator and Research Project Manager

  • Meta: Meta Research PhD Fellowship Program 

  • Freedom House: Policy and Advocacy Officer or Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer, Technology and Democracy

    • There are **many** open positions at Freedom House.  Check them out here: https://freedomhouse.org/about-us/careers

  • National Endowment for Democracy: Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program 

  • Democracy Works: Openings for software engineer and director of HR

  • Atlantic Council DFR Lab: Variety of positions open. More info at link.

  • Atlantic Council: #DigitalSherlocks Scholarships 

  • Meta Oversight Board: Variety of positions open. More info at link.

  • National Democratic Institute (NDI): Variety of positions open. More info at link.

  • Protect Democracy: Technology Policy Advocate

Calendar

  • Topics to keep an eye on that have a general timeframe of the first half of the year:

    • Facebook 2020 election research

    • Oversight Board opinion on cross-check

    • Senate & House hearings, markups, and potential votes

  • September 6 - 8: Code 2022 - Vox/Recode Silicon Valley Conference

  • September 11 - Sweden elections

  • September 13 - New Hampshire Primary (Hassan defending Senate seat)

  • September 13 - Twitter Whistleblower Hearing

  • September 13 - 27: UN General Assembly

    • Sept 20 - High level general debate begins

  • September 15 - International Day of Democracy 

  • September 21-23: Atlantic Festival

  • September 27 - 28: Trust Con

  • September 28 - 30: Athens Democracy Forum

  • September 29 - 30: Trust and Safety Research Conference

  • October 2 and 30: Brazil

  • October 15 - 22: SXSW Sydney

  • October 17: Twitter/Musk Trial Begins

  • November 8: United States Midterms

  • March 10 - 19: SXSW

  • March 20 - 24, 2023: Mozilla Fest

  • Events to keep an eye on but nothing scheduled:

    • TicTech

Thanks for reading Anchor Change! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

3
Share this post

A Comparative Look at Tech Company Election Announcements

anchorchange.substack.com
Share
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Katie Harbath
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing