Alphabet and Meta released the most announcements.While much has changed from the 1990s to today, some key themes emerge: In the following pages, we provide a brief history that has many twists and turns as different platforms come on the scene and then both embrace and grapple with their role in political discourse around the world. Wherever we could, we linked the existing releases or news stories, and where we could not, we provided a footnote with the appropriate citation from LexisNexis. In addition, Harbath was a digital strategist for various Republican campaigns in the early 2000s, including at the Republican National Committee and the National Senatorial Committee. She also coordinated the company’s work on elections around the globe from mid-2013 to late 2019. #Warroom org podcast how toHarbath was a public policy director at Facebook for 10 years, where she built the teams working with politicians and governments on how to use the platform. This task involved curating all the public announcements from tech companies about their election work, and we supplemented it with searches in LexisNexis and interviews with professionals who worked on these efforts at various platforms – including one of this report’s authors, Katie Harbath. We analyze a database of links released by the Bipartisan Policy Center in August 2022, and updated since. Instead, the report offers a snapshot of campaigns from the tech companies’ point of view. We also do not go deep into the effects of bloggers or the mainstream media on the political process. This report is not a comprehensive examination at how campaigns used technology over the years many online tools such as email, websites, fundraising platforms, and texting are not covered. We also document how platforms transitioned from touting their importance to candidates’ voter outreach to the deplatforming of a sitting president of the United States for violating their community standards. We chronologically catalog which companies were founded during that timeframe and their public messaging about their election roles. This report analyzes the public announcements made by technology companies over the past 26 years. Gone were the posts bragging about how Trump’s online strategies helped him win (unlike when President Barack Obama won in 2012) in their place came announcements about preventing foreign interference, protecting against mis- and disinformation, and building political ad databases. Seemingly overnight, tech platforms turned from positive forces in democracy to negative ones after elections in the Philippines, Brexit in the United Kingdom, and the shock of Trump’s upset win in the United States happened. Donald Trump put companies’ content policies to the test. They co-hosted debates, shared data on how much people were talking about candidates and issues, and helped register voters. They boasted how candidates found their platforms indispensable in reaching voters. They proactively touted their partnerships with media organizations in helping people get news and information. With the advent of social media in the early 2000s, new platforms emerged nearly every year that would transform how candidates communicated, voters engaged, and the media covered the day-to-day horse race.įor the first 20 years, many platforms embraced their role in the democratic process. In the 26 years since, technology has had a huge impact on elections around the world – for better and for worse. The first political campaigns to utilize the internet were President Bill Clinton’s and Republican nominee Bob Dole’s in 1996. Give Search Keywords Submit Policy AreasĪ Brief History of Tech and Elections: A 26-Year Journey.
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