What's Different for Tech & Elections in 2024
Fifteen things that have changed since 2020
Greetings from Miami, where I’ve been nerding out with some of my favorite people in the world who work at the intersection of technology and democracy.
A part of this nerding out has been thinking about the evolution of how platforms have approached elections over the years. Now that we’ve had a handful of platforms announce their 2024 plans, I’m getting a lot of questions about what’s different from 2020.
I started with the grand plan to make a comparison grid, but it quickly got unwieldy with twenty different categories across twenty-plus platforms. I’m not giving up on this yet; I need more time to organize it.
So, instead, I came up with ten ways 2024 is different for tech companies vis-a-vis elections.
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First, here are links to all the announcements I know of thus far. A reminder that I keep track of these and all past announcements in this database. (Sidenote: I used a Data Analyzer GPT to help me analyze this spreadsheet and ask questions like how many companies made an announcement in 2016 or 2020, which countries they cover, etc. It was so helpful, fast, and pretty accurate.)
Microsoft: Microsoft announces new steps to help protect elections
YouTube: Supporting the 2024 U.S. Elections
Second, let’s look at how company announcements/approaches to elections have changed since 2016 (This work actually goes back much further, but for the sake of this piece, we’ll start here):
2016 - Ten platforms made public announcements about their work on elections. These focused on debate partnerships, how much people talked about the election on their platform, and how candidates used their tools to reach voters. Many also provided information on where, when, and how to vote.
2018 - The same ten platforms made announcements going into Brazil’s 2018 elections and the U.S. midterms. Being the first major U.S. election after 2016, platform announcements shifted to highlighting the efforts they put into building election integrity tools, including political ad transparency, new electoral policies, and things like election war rooms.
2020 - Being the first U.S. Presidential election since 2016, numerous platforms wanted to show that they were trying to help protect the integrity of the election. Nineteen platforms shared announcements throughout the year to demonstrate that they were ready. We saw a deluge of new efforts - especially around labeling content, whether from a fact check or directing people to authoritative information on topics such as mail-in voting. This was likely the peak of tech company efforts in this space.
2022 - The U.S. midterms brought announcements from 23 platforms. Being the first election since January 6, companies again wanted to show that they were taking these issues seriously. You also had additional platforms making announcements that previously hadn’t, like Cloudflare. The focus remained on fighting foreign interference, political ads, etc.
That brings us to 2024 (BTW, sorry for just using U.S. election cycles. Given that most company announcements are global or specific to the U.S., it was easier. Most companies don’t do specific posts by region. Meta is the only one who has done the most country-specific posts.)
I can tell you what hasn’t changed since 2020. The themes platforms are still okay drawing attention to include fighting foreign interference, showing people authoritative information on where, when, and how to vote and highlighting that they have election-specific policies and how they handle political ads.
Here’s what’s different - in no particular order:
Companies are saying a lot less, but not necessarily doing less - Politics is a particularly ugly game right now. The tech companies have realized there is no winning by being vocal about work where no one can agree on the right approach. But they know they have to say something. And, just because they aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean work isn’t happening. It makes it far harder to hold them accountable when we lack transparency.
Demoting reach of politics and news - This is mostly a Meta thing, but we see it with TikTok and other apps. In an age where GenZ gets most of its news from social media, wants it delivered via video, and wants political news the least, I get why Meta is getting out of the business. Their approval ratings went up by showing less news. However, it’s having a devastating effect on the industry. This morning, I went down a rabbit hole thinking about how much the news industry will change as GenZ becomes adults, which will be a future post. In a time when people are burnt out on news and not excited about Trump or Biden, I worry about what this means for people being civically engaged over the next decade.
Rise of unconnected content - Originally, what we saw in our social media feeds was based on things we had chosen to connect with and follow - family, friends, businesses, celebrities, politicians, etc. However, TikTok and, increasingly, Meta’s properties are showing people content they think a user might like to see based on other content they’ve engaged with. Recommendation engines have been an area of concern for some time, but in many ways, platforms play even more of a role in deciding what people see.
X allowing political ads again, platforms handling ads differently - Then Twitter banned political ads in the fall of 2019 and Elon turned them back on. While I don’t think Twitter will make the $100 million, they are hoping a new report predicts Facebook and Google will see 156% growth from 2020. We are seeing different approaches to ads. TikTok bans them, Snap fact checks every ad before it runs, Facebook bans ads the week before the U.S. election, some have reduced targeting options, others - like streaming platforms - have no ad transparency tools. Some have committed to labeling AI use. Others - like broadcast or cable - have said nothing about what they will or won’t allow regarding AI use. I feel a little bad for political ad buyers to keep track of all these differences.
New entrants: Substack, Telegram, Truth Social - We have some new players this election to watch. Substack has already declared it wants 2024 to be known as the Substack election, and it has already found itself in hot water for its content moderation policies (or lack thereof). Telegram is where a lot of nefarious content starts and then spreads. I think Trump will keep posting on Truth Social and let his supporters share those messages elsewhere. The space is much more fragmented, making tracking what is happening harder.
Fragmented news consumption across generations - I already mentioned how GenZ is turning to TikTok for news, but older generations are still very much turning to national and local television news. Local newspapers as well as national ones are undergoing massive transformations. People are listening to more podcasts. This plus the fragmentation of online platforms adds to the difficulty of understanding how information will flow across all these places.
New consumer use of tools such as AI - This one feels self-explanatory, but while AI has been around for a while, this is the first election where the tools are more widely available for anyone to use. While there’s a lot of focus on the negative ways it could be used, I’m also very excited about the positive ways it can help campaigns and others.
AI tools choosing to block politics - With the advent of these tools, most companies building them are blocking political use from the beginning. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Bard, amongst others, have announced various rules around this. Now, the million-dollar question will be how well they enforce those rules. OpenAI just banned a developer for Dean Phillips for building a chatbot, but other uses have gotten through. Even if the bigger players ban politics, others will allow it. Acceptable use of AI in politics is a space where I’d love to see more research, thinking, and debate.
Less government engagement with companies - One criticism coming out of 2016 was that the platforms and the government had not collaborated enough to stop Russian influence on the election. Thus, the two, plus civil society and academia, started working together more for future elections. Now, with pending court cases questioning the legality of those partnerships, Meta has reported that the government stopped talking to them in July. This has had a chilling effect on this work.
Court cases - Never before have there been pending court cases that will directly impact how online platforms can do this work. Not only do we have a few in front of the Supreme Court where the decisions could come as late as June, but numerous are also working their way through the states. This could pause some work - like the abovementioned partnerships - until they are settled.
New regulation - This is the first election year where regulations are enforced in Europe and many other places worldwide. While there hasn’t been regulation in the US, these efforts overseas could impact what the companies do here at home.
Moral dilemmas over platform use - Users, journalists, creators, candidates and others are choosing to leave platforms like X or Substack based upon their content moderation (or lack of) policies. Some can’t quit the habit. Society is pressuring people to make a moral call on where they spend their time. Candidates are also facing this dilemma - especially the right in whether or not to use TikTok. Some say, it’s where the young voters are and they can’t ceed that to the left and others don’t want anything to do with a company that is Chinese owned.
Rise of the influencers - Mike Bloomberg tried to use influencers during his brief candidacy in 2020, but it wasn’t necessarily a huge part of campaign strategies. That’s changed in the last four years with companies popping up to help connect campaigns to influencers as well as campaigns such as Biden’s and Biden aligned SuperPACs to openly say influencers are a big part of their strategy. This opens tricky questions around transparency of who is being compensated or not.
Less transparency and data for researchers - I still cite Kate Klonick’s piece about the “End of the Golden Age of Tech Accountability” all the time. In years past, researchers had much more ability to know what was happening online. Today, they don’t - for various reasons. There’s hope that the DSA will compel some of this, and in fact, the European Commission has asked the companies to outline how they will comply. We still don’t have all of the research that Meta did with researchers around 2020 (that’s not Meta or the researchers’ fault, this stuff takes a long time). Still, not great. One of the things I’m worried about this cycle is what the unknown unknowns are and what we’re going to miss.
Rise of trust and safety consultants/vendors - This is the community I’m now a a part of, but in 2020 you didn’t have nearly as many vendors and consultants in the trust and safety space. Some of that is due to layoffs, but it’s also the continued professionalization of this community. They are not only sharing their expertise more with civil society and governments in addition to online platforms of all sizes, but they are sharing more with one another through organizations like the Integrity Institute, the Trust and Safety Professionals Association and All Tech is Human.
I’ll keep you posted on a more comprehensive graphic about how various companies handle elections. I should also note that just because a company hasn’t announced anything yet doesn’t mean they aren’t working on this stuff. Looking back at other election cycles, many announcements came in the Fall ahead of the U.S. general election. So, we still have a long way to go.
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.
Nice job!