Are Platforms Prepared for the Post-Election Period?

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On Tuesday, November 5th, the final ballots will be cast in the 2024 US presidential election. But the process is far from over. How prepared are social media platforms for the post-election period? What should we make of characters like Elon Musk, who is actively advancing conspiracy theories and false claims about the integrity of the election? And what can we do going forward to support election workers and administrators on the frontlines facing threats and disinformation? To help answer these questions, I spoke with three experts:

• Katie Harbath, CEO of Anchor Change and chief global affairs officer at Duco Experts;
• Nicole Schneidman, technology policy strategist at Protect Democracy; and
• Dean Jackson, principal of Public Circle LLC and a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Katie Harbath:

I'm Katie Harbath. I'm the CEO of Anchor Change, which is a tech consulting firm. I'm also at Duco Experts, and before that I was at Facebook for 10 years.

Nicole Schneidman:

I'm Nicole Schneidman. I am Protect Democracy's technology policy strategist, where I oversee our work that lives at the intersection of tech and democracy here in the United States. Prior to Protect Democracy, I was also at Facebook, working there for about five years on Facebook groups.

Dean Jackson:

I'm Dean Jackson. I am the principal of Public Circle, LLC. I'm also a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press, a non-resident fellow at the Digital Forensics Research Lab and CSINT at AU. And I never worked at Facebook, but I did do a short stint on the January 6th Committee social media team.

Justin Hendrix:

So, we are going to have, hopefully, a wide-ranging conversation about the topic that's on most folks in our circle's minds these days, which is the upcoming election, what to anticipate, in particular from technology platforms, how they may handle the post-election period, particularly if there is some volatility as there was, of course, four years ago.

I want to ask Nicole and Katie, perhaps, for any of my listeners who may not be so intimately familiar with the US election process, and for, perhaps, some who are, what are you thinking about as the important milestones, the moments between Tuesday and the transition's completion in January? What should folks be paying attention to?

Nicole Schneidman:

So there are five key milestones that I think both Katie and I would encourage all of your listeners to be paying attention to, and I'll walk through all five dates. So first, we've got election day. This is one that I think is top of mind for all of us. We are officially on a countdown. This is Tuesday, November 5th.

One thing to keep in mind is that election day not only marks the last day for in-person voting, and while this varies across the states, it's typically also the deadline by when mail-in ballots at minimum need to be postmarked and returned.

It also, after polls close, marks the beginning of a critical set of steps by which ballots are counted, canvassed, and ultimately, results are certified, first at the county, and then the state level. After November 5th, a date that I would want everyone to keep in mind is December 11th.

So, in 2022, Congress passed what's known as the Electoral Count Reform Act. And this was a piece of legislation that was meant to shore up the process by which electoral votes are cast and counted.

So, under the ECRA there is a new deadline by when states need to issue their Certificates of Ascertainment, which is just basically a fancy way of saying states identifying who their electoral slates are. So, this is a new deadline. This is the very first cycle where we have this deadline in place. So, we want folks to keep that date of December 11th in mind.

Next up, we've got December 17th. This is when the Electoral College convenes. One thing to keep in mind is that the Electoral College convenes on a state-by-state basis. So what this means is that a slate of electors for each state meets at a particular location. This is typically defined under state law, and very often, this is state capitals.

After December 17th, the next date that I want folks to keep in mind is one that is probably familiar to many of us, this is January 6th 2025. So, on January 3rd our new Congress will be officially sworn in, we hope, and on January 6th we'll have the joint session of Congress, during which Congress counts and certifies the results of the Electoral College.

And then, last but certainly not least, let's mark our calendars for January 20th 2025. This is Inauguration Day, the date on which our President-elect and Vice President-elect are sworn in on the National Mall at noon. So, those are five key dates that take us all the way from Tuesday through January 20th. We're going to be in this for a few more months, guys.

Justin Hendrix:

So Katie, perhaps I'll come to you next and just ask you, within those periods, are there distinct concerns you have that you think tech platforms should be looking at as they think about how to moderate claims about the election as we go towards that date?

Of course, we have no idea what's going to happen. We're talking on Friday, November the 1st. It could be a very clear result on Tuesday in either direction, but more likely, it will be a handful of days until the votes are counted and we know the outcome.

Katie Harbath:

Yeah, it would be a dream if we know by Tuesday. And every election official's dream is high turnout, high margins. There's always that possibility that we could have that, but we need to be ready for a lot of chaos.

And I think this is actually, really past elections, even 2020 many companies really scaled back their election work after the winner was projected the winner. And I think this is a really important thing for people to keep in mind is that when the news media projects a winner, they're just projecting it. They are not the election officials, they are not the official counters of the ballot.

And we could potentially even see two different news organizations calling it for different candidates. And so, now, these companies have to be aware of all of these milestones between election day and inauguration day because we all saw there were quiet periods before all of a sudden January 6th happened.

And so, what we're recommending to companies around all of this is, one, we're in one high-risk period right now. It started when early voting started. It will go until we have a winner projected, which, right now some people are saying probably Saturday after election day, but it's just really hard to know of what that could be.

After that is that time period Nicole mentioned between December 11th and December 17th. This is when we're particularly worried about protests happening in the state capitals, particularly those in the swing states. The next highest threat moment would be that week between January 3rd and around January 6th when all of that moves to Washington DC.

And then again, not just Inauguration Day, but the days leading up to it and the days leading after it, because if you'll remember, after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, the next day there was a huge women's march in DC. And so, we could potentially see unrest happening in any of those time periods.

So, those are the ones where we encourage them to be at their most heightened awareness and heightened 24/7 monitoring. The other ones, we recommend they continue to be doing work and having things in place, but they don't necessarily need to have it be def-con level, I can't remember which order it goes in, but the highest one.

Justin Hendrix:

Dean, based on your work on the January 6th Purple Team, which looked at extremism, looked at social media, how are you thinking about this transition period in particular, and what will be different about this cycle versus what we saw in 2020? I know you are more concerned that any potential unrest might be geographically dispersed.

Dean Jackson:

Yeah, that's right. I think Nicole and Katie did a great job of running through the dates and the calendar. And I think this year is likely to be different just because Donald Trump isn't the President, and so he's going to make an attempt to claim victory in spite of massive electoral fraud.

I think that what we'll see is an effort to make that an issue earlier so that the states miss their certification deadline. And that will mean, probably, action in courthouses and maybe on the streets in many states.

You can imagine a situation where it all comes down to Pennsylvania, historically a slow state to count and certify its vote anyway. If there were to be unrest in parts of Pennsylvania near voting tabulation centers, for example, that made it difficult to certify the vote or just delayed it beyond a certain deadline, that could end up in the courts.

And so, the incentives on where if you were going to try to disrupt the election by using narratives about voter fraud to create unrest, the incentives are just lined up a little differently. There's not this opportunity to try and do an end-run with the Vice President in the same way that there was on January 6th in 2020.

And something that is, I think, dangerous about that that I've only recently started hearing people talk about is, January 6th was preceded by many protests in state capitals, but it was one big flashpoint.

In this situation we might have many smaller flashpoints, which means the chance of something going catastrophically wrong, one violent incident spiraling out of control could potentially be higher. And I think we have to really be worried about that in the weeks after November 5th.

Justin Hendrix:

So, I want to come to one of the points of vulnerability or one of the areas where I think we're all very concerned, which is about Election Administration, about election workers, about the people who are going to be charged with counting those votes and taking that process forward.

And maybe Katie, Nicole, I don't know which of you'd like to start on this, but there's a good amount of evidence, and maybe you'll dispute the extent of it, but a good amount of evidence that the platforms have, to some extent, relaxed their posture on election integrity, they certainly have laid off a lot of people.

You've got platforms like X, of course, which have taken a very different approach this go round. Do the platforms, to your view right now, have enough resources in place, particularly to support local Election Administration officials, state Election Administration officials who may come to them with threats or concerns about things that are happening online?

Katie Harbath:

So, I think there's a lot of actual... some things to unpack there because it's a much more nuanced answer than just a simple yes or no. First I would say is that not all the platforms are equal.

I think we need to put X in its own category. Same thing with ones like Truth Social, Telegram, versus those like Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, OpenAI, a vast majority who do have large teams who continue to work on this stuff.

The second point I would make as we're going into this conversation is separating out the leadership of these organizations who make these resourcing calls and make some of the calls around the policies, and the frontline workers who have been working their butts off all year in this global year of elections, who are coming to the end and are trying to do their best with what they've been given around all of this.

Because one of my pet peeves, and I texted this to Nicole yesterday, because if I hear, and I talk to so many people who are trying to do such great work, and I see these headlines of social media companies have given up, and that's just so demoralizing to so many people who continue to do so much good work.

So, I just need to put that plug in there that I don't want people thinking that everyone's gone away, nothing's there, there aren't people, because there are. However, that being said, there's always been a struggle.

There are thousands of local election officials, they don't necessarily know how to get in touch with the companies, they don't even know to work up through their Secretary of State, and things of that nature. So there's always been this communication and reporting problem around all of them.

Many of the platforms that Nicole and I have talked to are diligently trying to put into place measures to try to help prevent threats and doxing and things towards election officials. One of the challenges though is that there's not an easy database of all of them for these companies to be able to have all of their names...

Now, that's also probably a good thing, because then the bad guys can't also get that access to that database. But there's some challenges here that absolutely exist as part of this, and I think that most companies will want to try to prevent that.

But then there's that question of how well they can do on executing it, and how well their systems will be in actually detecting that quickly, being able to take it down, what does that look like?

And there's one thing Nicole and I really tried to implore on them was that, if they're giving out people's home addresses, phone numbers, stuff like that, that should be taken down. I think a harder question, one we need to explore more is, some of these election officials are elected, they are public figures.

And so, where is it a legitimate criticism of their work or questioning of it versus not? So, I apologize for the really complicated answer to it, but I do think that this is one of those things where we need to recognize. I think many of the company's stated goals will be to try to protect these officials. The question that remains to be seen will be how well they'll do in actually executing that.

Justin Hendrix:

Nicole, you issued a report from Protect Democracy earlier this year, and I think the number one recommendation was around appropriate staffing levels and making sure that there are enough people on hand to do this work.

Nicole Schneidman:

Absolutely. The job doesn't get done without having people who are resourced against these areas as priorities. And I think what I am encouraged by is, the folks that we have been meeting with, it is always inspiring to see and literally hear from people who are doing this work at some of the platforms that Katie mentioned.

So, absolutely, resourcing these teams, making sure that you have escalation processes in place so that as these scenarios arise, you're going to be able to navigate them, you absolutely have to have the people.

But one thing that I would also add to what Katie shared is, I think that a lot of the conversation around where we're at in terms of platforms readiness for both voting period and also the period after voting as we head more into just election administration ballot counting all the way through Inauguration Day, is the state of platform policies.

And I think there's no denying, there has been an unwinding of that are really focused on contesting the integrity of past elections. We saw this from YouTube, Meta also unwound their ads policy that was basically focused on contesting the integrity of the 2020 election.

We saw X do some more unwinding that was focused on their language that had been on the books related to misleading information about outcomes.But one trend that I do think is hopeful and encouraging is, we have seen additions to platform policies related to protecting election workers.

So, I think that is an encouraging signal that platforms are aware of this trend that has been growing, frankly since 2020, where, I think that right now about 38% of our election officials, this was a survey that the Brennan Center conducted this year, 38% of election officials say, in their day in and day out work of being an election official in this country, they're experiencing threats, harassments, and the potential for violence.

So I am encouraged to see some of the platforms get on the books language that is very specific to election workers. A couple of examples; X added to their Civic Integrity policy, some language related to basically prohibiting inciting others to harass voters or poll workers, who are going to be a really critical stakeholder as we head into, certainly, administering polling locations, but also, counting ballots.

YouTube also added a specific example to their Elections Misinformation policy that prohibits telling viewers to incite physical conflicts with election officials or other individuals at polling locations to deter voting.

So, I am encouraged to see some of this language getting added to the books. That is a bit of a change than we were at, certainly in 2020, and even in 2022. I think, though, where there is an open question, and there still remains a gap is, a lot of the platform policies are focused on voting period.

And that does make sense. We have robust First Amendment carve-outs related to protecting information in this country that touches upon time, place, or manner of voting. So, you see a lot of the platform policies put an onus on safeguarding voting, that constitutional right that we all have as Americans.

What's less clear, though, is Election Administration also covered by some of these policies, especially where they're really focusing on voting language. One thing that I would call out as a standout is actually TikTok's Civic and Election Integrity policy, that specifically has on their books that their policy covers civic and electoral processes.

And it specifically notes that this includes outcomes of elections laws, processes, and electoral interference. That's much broader language than we're seeing from some of the other platforms, and it's good to see that. But I think that this is a real challenge.

I think part of this we need to acknowledge is the harsh realities of how the First Amendment works in this country. Certainly, the platforms have the ability to make their own choices. They can actually go well beyond how the First Amendment functions because they are private entities.

But it is worth noting that while we do have this carve-out to the First Amendment related to information, again, for voting, that is not the case in terms of maybe telling lies about election outcomes.

In this country we have strong protections for political speech, and the harsh reality is, that does include lying about the election and election outcomes. Now, there are other ways in our jurisprudence in this country to be able to hold people accountable for spreading those lies.

I'm thinking of true threats, I'm thinking of defamation law. So, there are still certainly ways of holding spreaders of that information accountable, but it is something, I think, important to acknowledge as context here as we're evaluating some of the decisions the platforms are making.

Justin Hendrix:

We'll see how that X policy holds up, watching some of the stew of stuff that's coming out of that election integrity community that Elon Musk has stood up there, and I'm concerned that their policy may be nothing more than window dressing at the end of the day.

But Dean, I want to come to you and ask you about the flip side of it. You've just conducted a report with a bunch of Ohio election administrators in particular, one of a kind of drumbeat of reports, I should say, that you've put out over the last four or six weeks. What did you learn talking to them?

I know a lot of concerns about resources, some of the things that Katie and Nicole have already mentioned. How are they thinking about how to deal with the stew of disinformation and threats that they're facing?

Dean Jackson:

Yeah, I would pair that report I did in Ohio where I live with another report I helped the Bipartisan Policy Center put together that was based on a series of tabletop exercises in five states over the summer. The five states were North Carolina, Pennsylvania, again, Ohio, and then, I'm forgetting one.

But essentially, swing states too, and we'll throw Ohio in there too because they had a really good partner in Cincinnati in the election community. And one thing I was really struck by is this idea that, yeah, the election officials and the tech companies don't know each other as well as they should, which, at first I thought, "Wow, great. There are these opportunities for them to meet and exchange business cards and build those relationships."

And then, I sat back and thought, "But of course, it's been four years since the last election." And I was able to contact the director and deputy director of every county in the Ohio Board of Elections at home from my laptop. So, it does seem like, if I were at a tech company, that's something I could do. I could have a relationship, at minimum, with Secretaries of States, and then large urban areas.

But those relationships seem to, if they exist, then someone moves on from that job, and then they aren't reconstituted. They're established on a very personal level, not an infrastructure level. And I think we need to start thinking about them as infrastructure.

And tech companies have... It's hard to overstate how many more resources tech companies have than election officials. And that's the main theme I got from conversations with election officials in Ohio is, first off, they're very tired.

Ohio's had 10 elections in three years because of some very high profile special elections, including one for an abortion rights amendment last year, and now, one related to gerrymandering.

But also, because of the incoming threats and harassment they're receiving, and that includes legal harassment, it includes every county in Ohio receiving a FOIA request for what one official described as every scrap of paper related to the 2020 election that costs them taxpayer money and time to go through.

And if you are talking about a populous county like where I live, Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland sits, they have a pretty large staff organization. If you jump down one rung in the tier of levels of population from that, you start to get to places that have six people. Down from that, if you're in a rural county, it's two.

And that's actually a pretty good situation because sometimes in Georgia, it's one part-time person. And so, whenever you see, in a report or something, election officials need to do this, you need to give them resources to do this, you've got to remember, you are sometimes talking about just two people.

If you say election officials should build relationships with local religious leaders so they can combat election misinformation, for example, that is now a bullet point on some election director's to-do list. And they're already spending upwards of 30, 40% of their time engaging with the public trying to build, rebuild, and rebuild trust in the election system.

In the absence of infrastructure to support them with tech companies, with government, the types of things that you started to see spun up in 2020 but which have crumbled under political pressure since, in the absence of that, we've really offloaded a lot of that work to the people who are on the front lines, most vulnerable, and least well-resourced to do it.

And that has really burned a lot of them out. There's been a lot of news coverage about turnover in the elections workforce, people at the Bipartisan Policy Center will tell you. Some of that's overblown in large urban areas especially. Replacements for people who have left are still pretty experienced people. Smaller counties, that's not always the case.

But the fact remains that Ohio lost about half of its elections directors over the last four to six years. And when they go to Staff Association meetings in Columbus, they tell you they see a lot of new faces and they get a lot of scary questions on their listservs about basic processes that people just are scrambling to catch up with because it's their first presidential election that they're running.

Now, the end result of all of this new blood is that there's a higher propensity for mistakes, and that's also true of the stress that they're under. And those mistakes will of course be seized on by bad-faith actors to make more claims of fraud and put them under more stress.

So, the system, it's not breaking, but it's bending, and eventually we're going to have to solve this problem of elections workforces that are underpaid, understaffed, overworked, and increasingly in hostile environments.

I talked to one Elections Director in Defiance, Oak County, Ohio, which is where, in the TV show, Scandal, there was actually a plot line about the election being stolen by voting machines. So, this is the Elections Director for that county, made famous by the show, Scandal, and she told me she goes to her kids T-ball games and people stare at her. The vibes in the community are bad.

Who would want that job? Who would willingly go into that job? And as people retire and continue to leave the workforce, we're really at risk of losing the civic infrastructure that makes democracy run.

Justin Hendrix:

I don't think anybody on this call believes that social media companies are responsible for the types of challenges that Dean just referenced, and the types of threats that are being made against these individuals.

Clearly, we can put the blame for that at the feet of political figures, media elites, others who continue to advance false claims that our election system is run through with fraud.

But I don't know, Nicole, Katie, how do you think about, these days, the responsibility of tech platforms towards addressing this problem that Dean's talked about, the volume of false claims that circulate on social media platforms? What responsibility do the platforms have to try to stem the flow here?

Katie Harbath:

So, in some ways, I feel like asking them to stem the flow is... I've been trying to think about different ways we need to approach this, because we've been trying the whack-a-mole method for a while now, and it's just not working, it's not working. We don't have the ways of detecting it.

There's so much out there. There's also going to be so much chaos and confusion where we... We'll have answers about what the process should be, but if you don't have an actual fact-check to point something back to, what do you do with it, what do you allow?

I think this is why Meta totally pulled back on politics and news. They were just like, "We can't handle all of this, and so, we'll just show less of it to everyone." And that, I think, has its own unintended consequences, which is probably another podcast show to be talking about here.

But they have a responsibility to not just put up their hands and say, "We're not doing anything." I think that they do have a responsibility of trying to make sure that they have different levers that they can pull to try to make sure some of this content is not getting spread too far and wide as it is happening, having ways to try to...

Dean is 100% right about this infrastructure problem in terms of local election officials being able to even report if something's being said about them online and wanting these platforms to know, because it's hard on so many different levels.

And so, I think that we can't just be like, "Oh, give up on it," but I think, also, they need people whose jobs it is to have those relationships with those election officials. We need people whose jobs it is to be able to continue to improve and build on the AI models that are being used to detect this type of material.

I'd be really curious to talk to some of them after this, about the challenges they had of even trying to keep up with this on their own. So, I apologize if I'm being rambly, but I think that what this shows is, if there were an easy answer to this, we all would be sharing it right now.

And the fact of the matter is, there's just a lot of these trade-offs that these companies are making about how to try to handle this content, and they're just constantly trying to find that balance, and I think this is something we're going to be facing every single election.

Nicole Schneidman:

So, I think Katie nailed it when she used the metaphor of whack-a-mole. This problem, especially if what we're talking about here is whether platform's responsibility in terms of their content moderation is to catch everything, I just want to emphasize that sadly, this is not Pokemon, you cannot catch it all. It is not possible.

This is truly a game of whack-a-mole at scale. And one of the things that I would highlight, and I think that you've had Ravi Aguirre as a guest previously, Justin, there are other levers that can be deployed.

We don't need to be thinking about this in terms of black and white, of either the content is there and there's nothing impeding its distribution at scale, or the content comes down. This is not a black and white problem.

There are a range of other levers that can be deployed here. Upstream levers that I'm thinking about are things like rate limits, proactively limiting distribution of suspicious accounts, or new accounts. There are other ways instead of the content just being taken down.

You can do things like de-amplifying the content, labeling the content, actually inserting friction into the path of the content, like prompting users to like, "Hey, maybe take a beat. Think about this before you share." So, I think that the task of trying to catch this all, that is not possible.

And Katie is right, if there were an easy answer, I think we would all be seeing that deployed across the board. That being said, there are a range of levers, and one of the things that I really want to convey to the teams that are working at platforms is that right now, in this moment as we head into this incredibly critical post-election day period, this is a good moment to have all of those levers at the ready.

What can you do proactively? Please do not wait for violence to erupt at a polling location, for a protest to go wrong at a ballot counting facility, for some kind of awful threat of violence to emerge related to one of our electors. You can't wait.

What can you do now, proactively, to be hopefully thinking about these scenarios in advance, putting things in place that help to mitigate them. This is about not just reacting in the moment, but proactive risk mitigation. I really believe that some of those levers are our best hope of being able to safely navigate the period that is to come.

Justin Hendrix:

Should the platforms be holding some of, let's say, the bigger moles to account, maybe? And we don't want to whack all the moles, but when you think about political elites, political figures, big media accounts, influencers, et cetera, should the platforms take a different perspective on how to hold them to account when it comes to spreading false claims or claims that might lead to political unrest?

Katie Harbath:

I would really like to try to rethink a new approach to this, because listen, I was inside of Facebook when we made the call around whether or not politicians would be penalized when they were fact-checked. And I say "penalized when fact-checked" because I do believe politicians get fact-checked all the time.

But what Meta didn't do was that, it wasn't going to be demoted and it wasn't going to get a label on it if that happened. I do believe people have a right to hear from those that want to represent them, and that political speech is one of the most protected things that we have in this country.

Now, you are 100% right, Justin, the companies, they have their own First Amendment rights to do whatever they want, but I think that this is one where I struggle with saying that we should... I understand the desire to hold them to a higher standard, but there's also a lot of other levers that... and trouble that this can put these companies into.

And so, I haven't had time to fully flesh this out or anything like that, but I think we need to rethink a new approach of what it means to hold politicians to account, not just what they say on their own platforms, but when they go on others.

Most of the candidates now, they went on podcasts, they went on influencers, they have a lot of other people who are sharing a lot of this stuff. And I think many people would agree that we don't necessarily want the platforms making the decision of what our political leaders can or cannot say.

Even Angela Merkel was upset when Trump got de-platformed after January 6th, and the companies having that power. So, again, I understand where people are coming from on this, I understand the desire to hold them to higher account and to try to find what those levers are going to be that are more than just every two to four years when the voters go to the ballot box, because we need something that's a lot more consistent.

But the trouble that we've seen with that is, even de-platforming Trump, he just started his own social media platform with Truth Social, and then that stuff gets spread around a lot more as well, and it also gets covered.

So, I know I'm probably not going to be popular with this answer, and welcome Nicole and Dean's thoughts on this too, but I've thought about this for so many years, and it's just one of those things I struggle so much on about what that right balance is of how to hold them to account, but not to then be taking on too much power as a company of making those decisions.

Dean Jackson:

It's a tricky question and an important question. I want to give my own perspective on it, which is a little different, but still recognizing the weight of the factors at play and the way Katie has laid them out on the table for us.

If you go to London, beside Hyde Park there's this tradition where they call it the Speaker's Corner. And people gather, and they stand on boxes, maybe literal soap boxes sometimes, and they yell things to the public, they give speeches.

And the first time I went to London, I went, because I thought, "Oh, what an interesting tradition. As an American, we have so many thoughts about free speech, I'm gonna go see this."

And let's just say I was disappointed in the quality of the speech I heard. Who has time on a Sunday afternoon to go stand on the soapbox and scream, right? It's not the best and brightest among us. But they all have a right to do it.

If the issue at hand were we're going to make political candidates invisible, banish them from the public square, they no longer have the right to stand on that soapbox in the park, that would be really bad. That would be, I think, way too far.

But platforms, what I would posit is, the more platforms there are, the less they are like the internet or the public square, and the more they are like the New York Times. They're becoming independent spaces with their own editorial voice.

And so, when a candidate asks the New York Times, "Can I run an op-ed in your paper," and the New York Times says, "No," that's not really, I think, a First Amendment violation, right?

Systemically, if every newspaper, as a cartel, said no, that might be a problem, but the more platforms there are, the less problematic I think it is for platforms to decide, "Hey, we're gonna hold you to a higher standard even though you're a public official."

And we happened to be in a situation today where the number of platforms is increasing after a long period where there was much consolidation. In 2020 it felt like there were only three or four places on the internet that mattered. I don't think that's true today.

The other thing I just want to say is, we've talked about this whack-a-mole problem, and Katie's right, we've got to hold these people accountable. And these people, all of our leaders and would-be leaders of any party, this is an important part of democracy, they need to be accountable year-round.

We need to have conversations about political rhetoric and the effects it has on our society. I think the heated rhetoric that we've seen for more than, probably two decades now, I'd say, in the United States, and it's increasingly violent tenor was a factor in January 6th, and that's partially a result of incentives in the media environment.

There's something about the machine that makes the moles go faster and makes them bigger and makes them meaner. I don't know exactly what we need to do to slow it down and to give them incentives to be better behaved during the entirety of every four-year election cycle and not just part of it.

But that, to me, is the fundamental challenge, what do we do to make platforms a place that don't reward to the extent they do, and that's a scientific question which we should be debating and are debating, but to the extent they reward inflammatory speech and bad behavior, as part of the media environment, which is prone to clickbait and has never been perfect, but how do we dial that back, because it is gradually engulfing our country.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask about the Musk factor. One of the things that is different about this cycle, of course, is that the person leading Twitter is all in for a particular candidate, and is himself spreading false claims about this election, false claims about the prior election, and appears to be using every resource that he has, both on the platform and beyond it, to advance his own political aims.

I'd love to just ask each of you what you think the possibilities are, how far that might go. It's possible Elon Musk emerges as the great hero of the Trump campaign, having played such a huge role in the get-out-the-vote effort, put so much money into the effort through his PAC, and of course, warped all of X and Twitter around the particular political outcome that he would prefer.

It's also possible that things will go a very different direction, in fact, there is contested outcome, what do we make of Musk's behavior, what are you concerned about, I suppose, I'll ask each of the three of you.

Dean Jackson:

Elon Musk has very clearly decided to shoot his shot in this election. He has put a lot of... in a very public way, thrown his weight behind Donald Trump's campaign. I'm really worried about the types of things we're seeing with America PAC, the PAC that Musk created and supports, and its Election Integrity group on X.

We've seen photos of election officials circulated with accusations of wrongdoing, lots of false claims of election fraud, including a few that seem to have come from Russian influence operations, and have gotten a lot of attention, including one today that the Secretary of State of Georgia felt compelled to respond to.

And that to me doesn't feel like an accident. I think, given Musk's pattern of repeating those types of claims, this is X and America PAC and the Election Integrity effort working as intended, and after the election, I'm very worried about, if we do have a close result and it's at all contested, how he will attempt to put his finger on the scale.

And that's new. We didn't have that in 2020. Platforms were contorting themselves in all sorts of shapes to try and lean out of traffic. Musk is leaning in, and that is new and scary.

Justin Hendrix:

Yeah, to me it's almost as if, after January 6th, 2021, Jack Dorsey... You have to worry about this scenario... if after January 6th, Jack Dorsey was, "No, not only are we not going to take any action here, but in fact, we're all in on Stop The Steal, and I'm sponsoring buses to the inauguration."

Nicole Schneidman:

Yeah, if I could just weigh in here. I think what I've been struck by, two kind of thoughts. First, it has been striking how much some of the decisions that have been made in the management of X are definitely not helping the bottom line, they're rather at the expense of it.

And so, I think that's a pretty striking decision that is getting made, and we're continuing to see the impact on just X's viability and sustainability as a for-profit entity really being impacted by some of the decisions getting made. Clearly, this is a political set of calculations, not a business set of calculations, and I think that's worth calling out.

Second, what I have been really struck by is how much Musk is leaning into a well-established, honed playbook that I think is really what we call at Protect Democracy, a 3D-frame arc, when we're trying to connect the dots in terms of the efforts that are already getting put in place to really potentially question the outcome of the 2024 cycle.

So, this is basically sowing information that is, frankly, completely false, already setting up things like non-citizen voting, questioning the results of voting machines. These are not new narratives. They have been in place in previous cycles.

It's just, in Musk's hands, they are being amplified at new levels, sowing distress, basically calling upon people to use X as a platform to monitor Election Administration. Dean mentioned some of these examples that we're already seeing. This is a intentional tactic that he is using, but it is not novel.

We saw, in 2022, basically calls to go and monitor drop-box locations. So, it's pretty fascinating how there's nothing new under the sun here, but this is what happens when someone has both the resources, the willingness to basically take profitability off the equation, and focus on purely a political agenda.

And what I'm really concerned about, our 3D framework ends in denial. All of this is being set up to basically set the stage for being able to really question the validity of the 2024 cycle, depending upon especially the Presidential race's outcome. And what is keeping me up at night is, what if some of the narratives that he's spreading become overt calls to violence?

What if there's a call that, "We believe election fraud occurred in this location. Everyone who is following me, convene here, we need to defend the election, come armed," what then? What are the consequences? I am really concerned that where we're leading, someone is going to get hurt.

And that is the last thing, I think, any of us who care about the integrity of the 2024 cycle, and frankly, care about democracy in this country, that is the last thing we want to see. So what is keeping me up at night are, there are real potentially tragic consequences in terms of lives at stake here.

Katie Harbath:

So, I agree 100% with everything that Dean and Nicole said, and violence is my number one concern as well. I will say, though, I think, Nicole, I slightly disagree with you because I think this is a business decision disguised as a political one, but it's a very high-risk one, meaning that if Trump wins, I think he's hoping it will be very good for his other businesses, not necessarily X.

And we're seeing that with other tech CEOs, right? Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, and some of those decisions. And I understand where you're coming from on that, but I do think there is a business calculation, just not for X, just for his broader empire.

Two is, I think that Elon and what he does is a very important thing for us to watch. He's a very influential figure. But I also think it is worth for us to zoom out and also remember that there's a lot of factors at play in this election and in folks, and I think one of the things that I'm watching is, what is this real impact of everything Elon is doing?

But what will this actually have in terms of, will it mobilize people, will it change anything, how effective is America PAC actually at doing get-out-the-vote, and those types of things.

So, we don't know yet what the impact of that is, but we could be on the cusp of a new era of how tech CEOs are playing in politics in the same way that we've seen different business CEOs in the past also play a role in our elections.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm not sure I find that reassuring at all, but-

Katie Harbath:

Listen, Justin, this is why I've got my "Panic Responsibly" line. I'm not telling people not to panic, but I'm just saying let's keep the bigger picture in mind while we're looking at everything, because right now, I feel we can get so overwhelmed with the what-ifs.

And the what-ifs that are important to look at, they're important to red team, they're important to go through, but they can also become very paralyzing, at least I find personally, if I think about them too much.

And so, I know whether there are election officials, tech folks, policy folks who are listening to this, most people are doing a lot to prepare and to try to be ready for this, and now it's just really going to come down to execution and see how this all unfolds, which, in and of itself is also scary.

But I also think, too, that there are a lot of people that are still working on this. I don't think it's hopeless, and I do think we'll get through it even though I think it might be messy.

Justin Hendrix:

Just a matter of days remain. The one moment of levity I can leave the listener with is, we've been talking so much about moles and rooting out moles, et cetera, that I've got scenes from Caddyshack going through my mind right now. I don't know if my kids have ever seen that one, I might have to show it to them this weekend.

So, I appreciate the three of you taking the time to speak to me this afternoon, and I hope we'll catch up after the election and take stock of all the things we've discussed.

Dean Jackson:

Thank you.

Nicole Schneidman:

Thanks, Justin.

Katie Harbath:

Thank you.

Related Reading:

• A Guide to Social Media Moderation Policies for the Post-Election Period
• Seeing Rising Election Misinformation, Americans Say Social Media Platforms May Bear Responsibility for Political Violence
• Tech Platforms Must Do More to Avoid Contributing to Potential Political Violence
• Evaluating the Role of Media in the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol
• How to Reduce the Danger of Social Media Facilitating Political Intimidation and Violence
• Deplatforming Accounts After the January 6th Insurrection at the US Capitol Reduced Misinformation on Twitter
• The Science of Social Media's Role in January 6
• Read the January 6 Committee Social Media Report